Designing for trust in an unregulated $60B Industry
The Company
I joined SuppCo in late 2024 on a contract. As someone who takes daily supplements, I was drawn to the complexity and impact of improving trust in a $60B industry with little regulation. SuppCo builds a transparent database of supplements, rating over 200,000 products from 8,000 brands with a proprietary TrustScore. We also have a certification program called TESTED, which independently purchases and tests supplements. After a few months, I recognized the potential of our product and the team, leading me to transition to a full-time role.
The Design Challenge
The core design challenge is trust, specifically balancing education and opinions about brands without appearing biased. TrustScore addresses this directly. Displayed on every product card, search result, and comparison, TrustScore lets users quickly assess credibility and details of each product. The model is transparent, so users can see the reasons behind each score. This builds greater user confidence, as shown by TrustScore’s growing influence on purchase decisions and the increase in TrustScore-driven engagement. Early on, as a beta-stage seed-funded company, we also faced feature overload. By trying to solve every problem, we lost clarity on user priorities. Removing features is tough, so we focused on understanding key user needs, reinforced by TrustScore, and made those prominent. Less-used features were deprioritized and became harder to find.
Peptide Tracking
Our newest big endeavor is peptide tracking and dosing. This tool addresses the current lack of reliable guidance for people already using peptides by helping them accurately track protocols and calculate doses—tasks that are otherwise confusing and error-prone. We are not recommending peptides or telling anyone to start, but for those who already do, this is the first real tool designed to bring structure and clarity to their routines. We started with the 10 most common peptides, user-tested with employees experienced in their own protocols, and will expand features based on actual community use.
Looking Back
Coming in as a contractor cost me some early momentum. I did not push hard enough on the problems I identified right away: a design system that wasn’t robust enough, internal processes that slowed us down, and features nobody was using. If I had known this was long-term, I would have addressed those issues before they snowballed. Some are still being unwound. The app is growing at about 1,000 new users per day.