Herbal Trials
Founded by meA nonprofit research organization studying herbs, mushrooms and ferments under physician supervision, with the governance in place before any study opens.
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Narrated by me. Captions are on by default, and the full transcript is below.
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0:00I founded Herbal Trials to address a difficult public health problem. People already use herbs, mushrooms, ferments, and other natural products, often without dependable evidence.
0:09We are building an independent non-profit research institution to study those interventions under physician supervision and publish what we learn.
0:18No study has opened yet, and the site says so plainly. At this stage, every public statement is a promise about how the institution will behave.
0:25I designed the entire digital foundation to make those promises visible, consistent, and independently checkable.
0:36The main property is not an edited collection of WordPress pages. I built 18 purpose-specific PHP classes that generate the public site from versioned code.
0:44There is no page builder and no modified theme. Content changes can be reviewed, compared, deployed, and rolled back like software.
0:52The second property, joined the canopy, is a next JS application I conceived and built to assemble the institution before recruitment begins.
0:59It organizes 123 roles across nine professional families with live search, structured requirements, compensation choices, committee nominations, applications, and distinct paths for applicants, reviewers, and administrators.
1:12This is not a decorative careers page. Qualifications, licensure, conflict review, training, participant contact, reviewer authority, and application requirements are modeled as data.
1:23Volunteering is a compensation choice available across the organization, but offering to serve unpaid never relaxes the qualifications required for a role.
1:36The Scientific and Ethics Committee is presented with the same precision. Seven voting seats, appointment procedures, independent standards, disclosure requirements, and removal rules are published in advance.
1:46The committee is appointed, but not yet seated. It is explicitly separate from an institutional review board and cannot be overruled for convenience.
1:58The giving system uses stripe elements, recurring contributions, fee coverage, major gift intake, and direct underwriting paths.
2:06Behind it, my first-party software protects credentials and crips backups, manages financial records, and measures activity without outsourcing visitor data.
2:15Sensitive contact addresses never appear in public HTML. The funding case does not sell a cure or imply research already completed.
2:22It explains the staged work required to build governance, methodology, ethics review, infrastructure, and sustainable research programs.
2:30That restraint is deliberate. Herbal trials does not sell supplements, provide medical advice, or make efficacy claims.
2:39The public record is unusually complete, articles of incorporation, federal filings, the IRS determination letter, bylaws, conflict policy, ethics framework, retention policy, and financial projections are published as primary documents.
2:52Versioned links prevent an updated record from being replaced by a stale cached copy. I also designed the institution for a world where artificial intelligence may summarize it before a person visits the site.
3:08Both properties publish machine-readable disclosures that divide authority between governance and recruitment, state current limitations, and explicitly prevent role listings from being misrepresented as open vacancies.
3:25Across both properties I conceived the experience, established the information architecture, translated institutional principles into enforceable system behavior, and personally built 52, 239 lines of custom code.
3:37The result is more than a website, it is the accountable digital foundation of a research institution being built in public.
Case detail
- Board governance portal carrying minutes, amendment proposals, signatures and recorded votes, with no generative model near the record
- A published commitment that every result will be released, including negative and inconclusive ones
- The public site states the research model, the governance structure and the current stage plainly.
- 501(c)(3) status granted, effective 2025-12-31.
- No study has opened, so no participants are enrolled and no results exist. That is a stage, not a gap.
- Screenshot
- Public page, captured live. Captured live from the public site on 2026-09-10.
