The Rooted Life/Q1 2026/one quarter/one developer/rootcausewell.com
The Rooted Life
Brand, course, assessment, and a personal AI. Solo build.
321
Question NAQ scoring server-side
60+
Training docs indexed locally
19
Body systems analyzed per client
1
Developer
“Slow medicine for women who've been told they're fine.”
Kristy Blacklock, NTP, FNTP · rootcausewell.com
A practitioner needed her own practice.
She had finished an NTP certification, a Reiki master training, and several hundred hours of clinical study. She had a method. She had paying clients. What she did not have was the platform to take it serious: a brand, a working assessment, a course, a portal, a way to handle compliance, and a way to get out from under tools she did not own.
I had a quarter. The constraint was sharp. It had to feel unhurried in a category of fast-talking wellness sites, it had to handle health information correctly, and it had to be cheap to operate solo.
Everything from the wordmark to the warehouse.
Brand identity
Palette, type, voice, product brief, full design system.
Marketing site
Home, foundations, about, blog, contact, FAQ, legal.
Foundations course
$67 self-guided course, 5 modules, lifetime access, Stripe checkout.
Foundations quiz funnel
5-question quiz routes prospects into the right module.
NAQ assessment
321 questions, 19 sections, 17 scales, autosave, resume, server scoring.
Client portal
Food journal, messaging, protocols, document sharing, supplements.
Admin deep-view
8-tab interface per client. Symptom burden, journal trends, audit log.
Compliance scaffolding
MHMDA + CHD privacy policy, consent capture, data export, deletion RPC.
Field-level encryption
pgcrypto on PHI columns. Service-role admin client behind RLS.
Email infrastructure
Resend transactional + welcome + purchase + password reset.
Personal AI library
60+ NTP training docs + ChatGPT export indexed locally on her machine.
THE PRACTICEpublic surface
Where prospective clients meet the work.
A 5-question funnel into the course.
On the marketing side, prospects answer five plain-language questions. The quiz scores them across the five foundations of nutritional therapy and routes the result into the matching module of the $67 course. Real version is wired to Stripe. The embedded one below runs entirely in your browser.
Find your foundation.
Five short questions reveal which of the five foundations is carrying the heaviest load right now. We start there.
// runs locally on this page · no backend, no tracking
321 questions. Server-scored. Resumable.
The NAQ is the standard symptom inventory for the NTP profession. Production ships all 321 questions across 19 body systems with 17 scoring scales, autosave on every keystroke, mid-assessment resume, and server-side burden computation. The eight-question slice below uses the same letter-route UI, the same hotkeys, the same autosave indicator. Saves to your browser’s localStorage so you can refresh.
Bloating or gas within 1 hour of eating
// 1-4 hotkeys · arrow keys to focus · backspace to revisit
A nutritional therapist is not a HIPAA covered entity. The site still treats data like one.
MHMDA and CHD privacy policy versioned, consent captured at signup, reaffirmed before any health data is collected. Field-level pgcrypto encryption on every PHI-class column. Row-level security on every table. A no-arg deletion RPC that wipes a client’s data atomically. Data export endpoint. Full audit log of every admin action.
The site is built so that the day she decides to seek a BAA with Supabase, the wrappers are already in place. Email and storage abstractions both BAA-swappable.
Until then, the defense-in-depth is honest about its limits and overbuilds where it matters.
THE RESULTSthe letter she sends
Where the body has been carrying it.
The visualization on the results letter.
After a client finishes the NAQ, this is the chart on the results page they receive in a long-form letter. Bars encode normalized burden across 17 visible body systems. Top three burdens get a tick mark and a label. The chart is part of a larger printed letter clients keep as their plan.
Where the body’s been carrying it.
- Diet6 / 1250%
- Lifestyle5 / 1050%
- Medications2 / 825%
- Upper G.I.14 / 2264%
- Liver / Gallbladder9 / 1850%
- Small Intestine7 / 1450%
- Large Intestine6 / 1638%
- Mineral Needs11 / 1479%
- Essential Fatty Acids6 / 1060%
- Sugar Handling9 / 1464%
- Vitamin Need8 / 1650%
- Adrenal13 / 1872%
- Pituitary4 / 1233%
- Thyroid9 / 1656%
- Cardiovascular5 / 1436%
- Kidney / Bladder4 / 1040%
- Immune System7 / 1450%
// scrolling into view triggers the bar reveal · stagger 80ms
Daily logging that doesn't feel clinical.
Inside the client portal, the food journal lets clients log a meal in under thirty seconds. Meal type, foods, hunger before, energy after, optional note, optional photo. The numerical scales are deliberately gentle. The language stays in client terms, not clinical terms. Entries below are seeded. Submit a new one and it appears at the top.
Food & mood journal
A small ritual after each meal. The pattern is what matters, not any single entry.
// optimistic UI · no upload happens · localStorage persists across reloads
THE PRACTITIONERbehind the counter
Where the practitioner does her actual work.
Eight tabs of context per client.
Kristy’s side. When a client books a session, she opens their deep-view: latest NAQ, current protocol, recent journal, shared documents, supplement plan, message thread, full audit log. Every action a practitioner takes is logged for compliance. Read-only mock here. The production version edits.
Hannah R.
- NAQ statusSubmitted, awaiting review
- Latest journalToday, 7:42 am · Breakfast
- Active protocolFoundations · Week 3 of 12
- Top burdenMineral Needs (79%)
// read-only mock · arrow keys cycle the tab strip
60+ training documents, indexed locally.
Off the website. On her machine. Every PDF from her NTP program, every Reiki manual, every Biotics protocol, every client form, every study guide, transcribed lectures, plus her ChatGPT export ingested via mychatarchive. Vectorized locally with semantic search. No data leaves her device. The library demo below is a mocked search over a representative slice of the index.
Kristy's nutritional library
Showing 8 of 22 matches · 22 of 60+ docs in the index
// search filters across title, excerpt, and category · 22 of 60+ docs shown
Her brain, queryable.
On top of the library, a private chat agent. She asks it clinical questions in her own language and it answers from her own training archive, citing the exact module and protocol. It also pulls client data when she points it at a specific NAQ. Five preset prompts below. The answers are pre-written but modeled on her real responses.
A small private brain.
Trained on Kristy's NTA modules, Reiki manuals, Biotics protocols, and her own client notes. It cites every claim back to the document it came from.
// click a prompt to send · streaming animation only · no API calls
Compliance is not a feature. It is the floor.
She is not a HIPAA covered entity. There was no regulator forcing field-level encryption, consent versioning, or an atomic deletion RPC. Plenty of practitioner sites in this category run on a Squarespace form and a spreadsheet and never get caught.
I built the floor anyway. MHMDA and CHD policy versioned at signup. Consent reaffirmed before any health data is collected. Pgcrypto on every PHI column. RLS on every table. A deletion RPC that wipes a client atomically. Email and storage abstractions that swap to BAA-covered providers the day she decides to seek one.
The work cost roughly two extra weeks against a quarter. It cost zero to operate. It bought her the right to scale without rebuilding, the right to take a referral from a clinical colleague without flinching, and the right to say yes to a client whose case is sensitive without asking herself whether the platform is honest with her.
A practitioner site that is honest about its data posture is worth more than ten that move faster.
// what was scaffolded but unused on day one
- BAA-covered email provider swap
- BAA-covered storage swap
- Atomic deletion RPC (no production deletes yet)
- Consent versioning (one version live)
- Per-record audit log (read but not yet exported)
// the carry-forward
Every practitioner-grade site I build now starts with the floor, not the features. The floor is cheap. The retrofit is not.
Live at rootcausewell.com. The 321-question assessment scores server-side, 60+ training documents sit indexed locally, and the first client cohort is actively using the portal.
What this project says, if you are reading it.
If you are a practitioner reading this, your platform should be honest about the data it holds and unhurried about the language it uses. Slow medicine deserves software that doesn’t rush you. I built this for one practitioner and the architecture works for yours too.
If you are an operator reading this, here is what one quarter of a focused solo build buys: a brand, a course funnel, a 321-question clinical instrument, a portal, an admin view, a compliance scaffold, and a private AI library on her own machine. All shipped from one keyboard.
If you are reading this and you are skeptical that any of these screenshots are live, that is fair. The site is at rootcausewell.com. The first cohort is using it.
Built solo · Q1 2026 · one operator behind every line of this page
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