1,000 coeliacs are now using glüf to eat out more confidently

A number, yes. But I don't want to write about it like a number.

Behind every one of those 1,000 is a person with coeliac disease who made a decision to trust us with something that genuinely matters to their health. They downloaded an app built by a small team with no outside funding and thought: maybe this will help me figure out where I can safely eat.

We don't take that lightly.

What the numbers tell us

The 1,000 user figure matters. But the number that tells us more is the return rate. Active users come back to glüf an average of four times a month. That's not casual use. That's people building it into the way they make decisions about where to eat.

For context: this is a community that has been let down by existing tools. Generic review platforms don't measure staff knowledge, cross-contamination practice or labelling clarity. They measure whether people liked the food. For someone with coeliac disease, those are very different questions.

The fact that people keep coming back suggests we're answering a question that wasn't being answered elsewhere.

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What we've learned from 1,000 users

Every review left in the app teaches us something. The four things users rate are not arbitrary: staff knowledge, labelling clarity, gluten-free variety and taste. They came directly from research into what coeliacs actually use to judge whether a venue is safe.

Staff knowledge is consistently the most scrutinised. Not the menu. Not the labelling. Whether the person who took the order understood what coeliac disease actually means. Not just that there's a gluten-free option, but what cross-contamination is and why it matters.

That insight has shaped everything about how we're building the restaurant-facing side of glüf. The question isn't just 'do you have gluten-free options?' It's 'do your team genuinely know what to do when someone with coeliac disease sits down?'

What comes next

Getting to 1,000 users on a bootstrapped product is something we're proud of. We're now building the infrastructure that will make glüf genuinely scalable: a structured onboarding and validation system for restaurants, data freshness indicators, and in-app tools to measure the impact we're having on confidence and anxiety around eating out.

We want the next milestone to be 1,000 restaurants with validated profiles. That's when this becomes something the whole community can rely on.

To our first 1,000 users

Thank you for every review you left. Every time you rated a restaurant's staff knowledge or flagged that the labelling wasn't clear, you made the platform better for the next person who needed it. That's the whole point.

glüf is free to download and always will be. If you know someone with coeliac disease who hasn't found us yet, please tell them. Growth for glüf means more data, which means safer dining for everyone in the community.