DYM (Dayima) Leverages Mobile Health Big Data to Address Reproductive and Gynecological Challenges for 120 Million Women

Chai Ke, Founder and CEO of Dayima

The small advertisements plastered on utility poles are a motley assortment, but one type is particularly glaring to women: “Treatment for cervical erosion, abnormal vaginal discharge, uterine cold and dysmenorrhea, irregular menstrual cycles…” These embarrassing conditions are a source of profound distress for women.

Why do they exist? Because many women lack access to information channels and solutions for their health issues. In the words of founder Chai Ke, Da Yi Ma’s latest strategic direction is to “remove the small ads from telephone poles,” marking a deep dive into the medical sector.

Mobile internet entrepreneurship has moved past its initial wild-west phase of frantic land-grabbing, as market entrants now vie for user share and engagement.

We have now entered the second half of the game, which focuses on how to uncover and grasp users’ deep-seated needs, build trust, and solve their practical problems.

Dayima was initially launched solely as a menstrual cycle tracking app and currently boasts 120 million registered users. In the Femtech (female technology) sector, companies with such a massive user base are rare.

How Did Dayima Enter the Mobile Healthcare Sector? VCBeat (WeChat: vcbeat) Conducted an Exclusive Interview with Chai Ke, Founder and CEO of Dayima.

What are the usage scenarios for Dayima? As a menstrual cycle management app, it enables women to access various gynecological knowledge and services related to preconception care, contraception, infertility, ovulation, menstruation, and dysmenorrhea.

“The Dayima platform hosts a large population of women of childbearing age. These individuals possess reproductive capacity from menarche until just before menopause, are in the prime of their lives, and exhibit the strongest purchasing power.”

Based on user attributes and scale, Dayima entered the e-commerce sector from the outset. The complete loop—where female users engage with the app, browse community forums, acquire knowledge, and ultimately purchase products—is a proven model for realizing commercial value.

However, how can this business model be maximized?

“Female consumers prioritize two dimensions: price and efficacy. For e-commerce platforms, product categories that more readily satisfy both criteria include apparel, handbags, and standardized goods such as infant formula and diapers.”

To attract users to make purchases, price wars are the most convenient channel for female-oriented community and e-commerce platforms. “If a company wants to pursue extreme cost-effectiveness, it must reduce its supply chain costs and customer acquisition costs. Once price wars break out, many platforms end up spending more than they earn.”

Under what circumstances do women prioritize efficacy over price? “When they have inelastic demand. Beyond beauty-related needs such as clothing and handbags, we are exploring new directions by focusing on user needs underlying traffic and purchasing behavior,” analyzed Chai Ke.

Women’s inelastic demand has, in fact, been evident for the past two decades in the “small ads posted on utility poles.” Let us analyze several common types of advertisements found on these poles:

Category 1: Infertility treatment. This includes infertility hospitals, various traditional Chinese medicine practitioners who claim to offer guaranteed cures for infertility, and surrogacy services.

The second category specializes in treating various gynecological diseases and intractable dysmenorrhea, with a single pill claimed to cure all ailments.

The third category primarily involves sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), which are highly private in nature, such as syphilis.

The fourth category is intimate aesthetics. It aims to restore the lower body to its appearance at age 20, a domain dominated by various beauty salons.

As these are relatively private health concerns, the need may persist throughout a woman’s life. However, the market lacks transparency, leaving consumers unaware of proper channels for resolution, which often leads many women to seek hasty and inappropriate medical care in times of urgency.

“For example, when preparing for pregnancy, some unlicensed institutions will immediately prescribe ten types of Chinese patent medicines. While these medications may be ineffective, they are generally not harmful to the body.”

The market demands a professional “brand” to address these essential needs of women and provide expert guidance. To this end, Da Yi Ma has not only delved deeply into user needs and segmented its user base, but also leveraged new technological tools to enter the mobile healthcare sector.

“The true business value lies in our ability to help women find professional, medical-grade health solutions and products that address their needs. Only then can business value be maximized; e-commerce is merely a means to achieve this goal.”

In November 2016, at the Luoke Conference, the founder and CEO of Dayima unveiled the FI-POCT system (Family Intelligent Point-of-Care Testing), a smart home medical device for intelligent home-based point-of-care testing.

This brand-new smart home medical device was born out of the vision to “help users conveniently obtain effective medical-grade data without leaving their homes.”

No need to go to the hospital; testing can be done at home.

The device has integrated monitoring for over 20 female reproductive and endocrine diagnostic markers, including progesterone, bilirubin, glucose, HPV, and occult blood. It can assist in the diagnosis of more than 200 conditions across three major categories (including reproductive, endocrine, and metabolic disorders) and support follow-up, tracking, and remote re-examination for over 500 conditions across five major categories. Furthermore, it presents results in a straightforward, visualized format, eliminating the obscurity of traditional medical terminology.

Chai Ke stated, “This device can help users accomplish the extensive task of interpreting medical data within a normal context, providing them with end-to-end services ranging from securing health insurance, accessing medical care, and undergoing health check-ups, to facilitating the subsequent purchase of health supplements and pharmaceuticals.”

With 120 million users, the Dayima platform has accumulated a vast amount of basic menstrual data. Why is it necessary to develop medical data?

On the Dayima platform, users seeking information on dysmenorrhea have access to multiple entry points. They can search for relevant knowledge, consult customer service, or be referred to physicians. Additionally, through various mini-classes on dysmenorrhea, users can learn about corresponding solutions, products, and services. Users can also utilize interactive tools to assess their specific type of dysmenorrhea or consult directly with a doctor.

Of course, this process is also applicable to other diseases. Most approaches involve using tools to guide patients toward physician consultations or enabling self-assessment and self-diagnosis following knowledge-based queries, thereby achieving the desired outcomes through these methods.

The core pain point here, as Chai Ke stated, is: “When women describe menstrual disorders, such as dysmenorrhea, they can only tell their doctors that they feel heavy and bloated. How can physicians determine the cause of pain remotely? Without visiting a hospital, it is impossible to obtain patients’ biochemical data and understand the underlying causes of the disease.”

Dayima’s deployed medical devices bring hospital consultation scenarios into the home and make them portable.

In short, due to the inherent nature of gynecological conditions, the medical devices used by Dayima are designed to assist women in achieving eugenics and healthy childbirth. Physicians on the platform provide remote follow-up and repeat consultations for women’s chronic diseases, rather than serving a direct diagnostic function.

Chai cited an example: “For instance, in cases of severe vulvovaginal candidiasis caused by Candida albicans in women, although vulvar pruritus resolves after medication, the Candida albicans hidden in the vaginal fornix is not completely eradicated. Women require more thorough treatment and testing.”

In such cases, both patients and doctors feel helpless. Dayima’s medical devices are designed for a scenario where, after the physician completes the diagnosis, the patient takes the device home for self-monitoring, thereby eliminating the need to queue at the hospital.

“Many metabolic and gynecological conditions in women, such as insufficient follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) levels or weak colorimetric responses during ovulation testing, can be fully monitored at home using diagnostic devices.”

Medical devices bridge the gap between physicians and users, enabling doctors to remotely access consumers’ detailed biochemical data. In the process of addressing health issues, the platform can recommend health products, pharmaceuticals, or medical services with greater precision and efficacy.

Chai offered a vivid analogy. “In fact, we are not starting from scratch; rather, we are building on an existing foundation of ‘1+,’ making previously inconvenient tasks more convenient.”

In terms of content and physician resources, Dayima has already initiated collaborations with DXY and Chunyu.

After a patient purchases or leases a medical device, “for example, a woman trying to conceive can use the device to measure data such as her husband’s sperm protein activity, uterine environment, vaginal environment, and follicle-stimulating hormone levels.”

The detected result constitutes medical data. When consulting physicians on the Dayima platform, “doctors do not rely solely on patient descriptions; they also incorporate medical-grade biochemical data to assist in diagnosis.”

In the interview, Chai Ke specifically highlighted a particularly severe and intractable type of dysmenorrhea that is highly prevalent among users: endometriosis. “This form of dysmenorrhea can no longer be alleviated through a series of methods such as physical therapy, dietary interventions, or exercise; medication is the only option.”

How can an app determine the type of dysmenorrhea a woman is experiencing, or identify which medications are suitable for her? “This is actually a rigorous process that requires joint assessment by pharmacologists and physicians. When we first embarked on this initiative, we proceeded with considerable caution, aiming to ensure that customers obtain medical-grade biochemical data and have access to physician consultation channels before making purchases, rather than relying solely on their subjective descriptions.”

Currently, for this category of users, Dayima has initiated in-depth collaborations with pharmaceutical companies of the caliber of Guangyuyuan and Bayer, enabling users to purchase medications for dysmenorrhea online.

In fact, for many gynecological issues in women, doctors can achieve an accuracy rate of over 90% by using the Dayima app for online auxiliary diagnosis.

“Gynecological diseases are quite interesting, as the quantity of urinary proteins is even higher than that in blood. Such conditions are well-suited for internet-based auxiliary diagnosis. Of course, certain hematologic disorders cannot be addressed without collecting blood samples, necessitating hospital visits.”

In the course of collaborating with pharmaceutical manufacturers, Dayima has been continuously delving deeper into user needs. Issues such as managing uterine coldness, replenishing qi and blood, alleviating water and sodium retention, addressing edema and puffiness due to deficiency, and intimate area whitening are not typically resolved in hospital settings. Instead, favorable outcomes can be achieved through a combination of dietary habits and over-the-counter (OTC) medications.

“We chose to partner with these well-known pharmaceutical brands in the hope of setting a benchmark within the industry.”

“We categorize users and recommend different content to different users in order to address their issues with greater precision. It is essential to know who the individuals behind the traffic are!”

Following this strategic positioning, Dayima has been striving to focus on women’s intimate health in both product design and planning as well as operational strategies. “We are now capable of delivering highly granular big data analytics, achieving a level of personalization where each user receives a nearly unique experience, with extremely detailed audience segmentation.”

In fact, Femtech has only emerged as a buzzword in the past couple of years. Chai Ke noted that they had previously identified a highly successful U.S.-based company in California called Glow, which has secured $23 million in funding to date. The core of Glow’s menstrual cycle management offering is designed for preconception care, targeting a niche segment characterized by the highest user stickiness and willingness to spend among women.

“Logically, Dayima and Glow are aligned. What is the underlying demand for women’s health behind menstrual cycle management? That is precisely the direction we are pursuing.”

In the course of refined operations, there are actually some very interesting phenomena. Chai Ke noted that on the Dayima platform, the most frequent type of post for a period was not about general health concerns, but rather users asking others to interpret whether their ovulation predictor kits showed a strong positive result. At its peak, this category reached 10,000 posts in a single day. “Because women often find it difficult to judge the color intensity with the naked eye, they hope that other sisters who have successfully conceived can help them take a look.”

User behavior or traffic does not directly reveal the business model, but it can uncover scalable directions for platform operations. This enables more precise recommendations of products and services to those with genuine needs during user conversion. “We employ medical-grade auxiliary diagnostic methods on the platform as a supportive tool to address patients’ complex health issues.”

In the future, Dayima may well address one by one those women’s health issues that were once advertised on utility poles.