Venture capital has long ignored the needs of women.

Miki Agrawal was sick of worrying about her tampon leaking. As a soccer player, “You can’t say, ‘Oh, ref, can you stop the game while I get a tampon?’’’ So she teamed up with her sister Radha and friend Antonia Dunbar to create underwear that would absorb two tampons’ worth of menstrual fluid without feeling wet. After a few years of tinkering, they’d engineered a prototype that worked – and still looked stylish. They called it Thinx.

But one challenge remained: How to get investors on board? The vast majority of venture capitalists – 90 percent, by one estimate – are men, and menstruation isn’t high on their list of concerns. “People didn’t get it,” Agrawal says.

A decade ago, that would have been the end of Thinx. But Agrawal had better options. She mounted a Kickstarter campaign that netted $65,000 and followed it up with an Indiegogo campaign that raised $20,000. In essence, she proved a market existed for Thinx, and investors jumped aboard. The product launched a year ago, and she’s already sold hundreds of thousands.

A fun success story! But it also heralds an interesting moment: Shifts in how tech is financed and, more crucially, how people talk about it, mean we’re about to see a boom in products aimed at the needs of women.

After all, the appeal of Thinx ought to have been obvious, right? Feminine hygiene products are essential. American women spend $3 billion a year managing their periods. It’s an enormous market. Yet it had been mostly ignored in the slurry of health tech: “We have a million step trackers and almost nothing for dealing with your period,” says Tracey Lindeman, a fellow journalist and friend of mine. That’s what happens when you have a disproportionately male VC world; they don’t always notice the unmet needs of folks outside their ambit.

Crowdfunding allows startups to route around VC disinterest by going straight to the consumers – the more underserved the audience is, the more responsive it’ll be. Consider the case of Livia, a company making an electric-stimulation device that eases menstrual cramps. This spring it blew past its $50,000 Indiegogo goal to net $370,000.

Research has found that women overperform on crowdfunding sites. Female-led tech projects have a 65-percent success rate on Kickstarter compared to 30 percent for men.

At the same time, social media has changed the conversation about women’s health. “Younger people are more comfortable talking about this,” says Sandra Fiset, a biomedical engineering student at the University of Toronto. She co-invented Diem Pouch, a leather case that reminds you to take your birth control pill – crucial for a drug that’s effective only if taken regularly. Upstart tech only survives if it garners word of mouth among supporters, and social media is an accelerant that gives products designed for women a better shot at thriving in the market.

CLIVE THOMPSON writes forWired and New York Times Magazine. He is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.