The First Order Was Mine: Week One of GUTSY

GUTSY went live on Sunday 1 November, and I would love to tell you that the first order came from a stranger who had been waiting patiently on the other side of the internet for a gut-friendly vegan protein to exist, but the truth is that the first order came from me, which is either the most founder thing I have ever done or the least, and I have spent most of the week unable to decide which.

The First Order Was Mine

The shipment had arrived, and I had a choice between behaving like a calm, measured business owner who would carefully test the checkout, or behaving like a woman who had spent more than a year drinking samples in her kitchen and could not wait one more minute to taste the real thing, and I think you already know which way that went. I went to the site, put a pouch in the basket, and paid for my own product like any other customer, which an accountant would probably describe as a circular transaction and which I prefer to describe as quality control.

And then I tasted it, and it was better than the samples. I want to be careful here, because every founder says their product is good and nobody believes them, but my husband and I spent a very long time tasting versions of this protein side by side on our kitchen counter, forty-seven of them, with tasting notes that mostly said things like “chalk”, so I know exactly what the samples were like, and the thing that came out of the real pouch was smoother and more like food than anything we had poured during all those months. What I felt was something between relief and suspicion, the way you feel when a flight lands early and you wait for someone to tell you it’s a mistake.

If you work in tech, you have almost certainly read, or at least nodded along to someone quoting, The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, whose whole premise is that you should never ask your mother whether your business idea is good, because she loves you and will lie to protect your feelings, and so will most of the people who care about you. Standing there with my first real scoop, I realised that I had become my own mother. I kept taking another sip and asking myself whether it actually tasted that good, or whether I simply needed it to, after more than a year of chalk, cardboard and manufacturers who disappeared with our money, and the problem with being both the founder and the first customer is that there is nobody in the room you can trust to answer honestly, least of all yourself.

Orders Two, Three and Four

The second, third and fourth orders came from friends, and I am not going to pretend that is anything other than what it was, which is people who love you deciding to put their money where their group chat is.

There is a version of founder culture that treats friends-and-family orders as slightly embarrassing, as if they don’t really count until a stranger has vouched for you, and I understand the logic, but I also think it misses the point quite badly. Those orders meant that the checkout worked, the payment went through and a real pouch went to a real home, and they meant that the people who had listened to me talk about this for what must have felt like several geological eras finally got to find out whether I had been exaggerating. It also helped, in a Mom Test sort of way, that none of them simply told me it sounded lovely, because a compliment costs nothing and an order costs real money, and the book is quite clear about which of those two you are allowed to believe. I am more grateful for those three orders than I can comfortably say in a public essay without becoming the kind of person who cries at the opening of a supermarket.

One of them sent me a photo of a glass of it, mid-drink, followed by a run of messages that I have read more times than I would like to admit:

Very light! I liked it. Tasted it with almond milk. Will taste more with water, greek yogurt etc and report back. So proud of you.

I am aware that “so proud of you” is precisely the kind of thing The Mom Test tells you to set politely to one side, and I have tried, but the rest of it is harder to dismiss. Nobody photographs a protein shake halfway through just to be polite, and nobody who is only being kind volunteers to run their own tasting trials with water and Greek yogurt and promises to report back, which is about the closest thing to real market research a friend can provide.

After that, the orders kept coming at a pace I would call decent for a first week, which is the most a founder in week one is allowed to say without tempting fate, a spreadsheet or both.

A Soft Launch, Mostly by Accident

I should explain that this was not a launch in the sense that most people imagine one, with a countdown, a campaign and a carefully choreographed sequence of announcements. We have posted exactly one video, and the rest of the launch has consisted of the website existing and people finding it, which makes this much more of a soft launch than a grand opening, and I would like to say that was a strategic choice, but it was mostly what happened when the product was ready before we were.

Because the honest truth about week one is that we weren’t ready. When the orders started coming in, I realised that we didn’t have nice boxes, we didn’t have merch, and we didn’t have any of the little extras you are supposed to tuck into a first order so that the person opening it feels like they have joined something rather than simply bought something. We had a very good protein in a very plain parcel, and an uncomfortable feeling that the parcel had arrived at the party before its outfit.

It is a strange kind of lateness, because the thing that matters most was on time. The product is what it should be, the formula is the one we fought for and the pouch is everything it says on the label, but I had spent so long concentrating on what was inside that I had somehow assumed everything around it would sort itself out, which is a belief I would never have accepted from anybody else and accepted from myself without a second thought.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, both flavours are on alwaysgutsy.com, and they are, for the record, much better dressed online than they currently are in the post.

Delivering Before and After Work

For the first few orders, the delivery service was me. I delivered them myself, before work and after work, which meant that my mornings began with packing a protein order and my evenings ended with dropping one off, and somewhere in between I went to my job and behaved like a person whose mind was entirely on her job.

I don’t want to romanticise this, because doing a delivery round on either side of a working day is not glamorous, but I also don’t want to pretend it was nothing. There is something about handing over an order yourself that no dashboard can give you, a reminder that every line in the orders list is a person who decided to trust you with something they are going to put in their body every morning. It is a lot of responsibility to hand over at someone’s door, and I felt every gram of it.

It is also, I am aware, not a delivery model that scales, unless the plan is for me to personally deliver every pouch across the UAE for the rest of my life, which I have been assured by everyone who loves me is not the plan.

Refreshing Shopify

In between the deliveries and the job, I have developed a new habit, which is refreshing Shopify, constantly, with the dedication I used to reserve for doomscrolling at midnight. It is, as far as I can tell, exactly the same activity in a different outfit: the same thumb, the same pull-down, the same tiny hit of hope, except that instead of bad news and other people’s holidays, I am waiting for a number to change.

I know it is insane. I know that refreshing the orders page does not create orders, in the same way that staring at a kettle does not make it boil, and I have told myself this several times a day, usually while refreshing it. The worst part is that it occasionally works, in the sense that every so often a new order is sitting there when the page reloads, which is precisely the kind of unpredictable reward that keeps people pulling slot machine levers, and which means my brain has learned absolutely nothing.

Nobody Is Buying One to Try

The thing that surprised me most this week was not the volume or the timing or even the fact that I paid for my own product, but what people actually put in their baskets.

I had assumed, with the confidence of someone who had never sold anything before, that most people would buy one flavour to try, because that is what I would do, and because a new protein from a brand nobody has heard of is exactly the kind of thing you are supposed to approach cautiously. Instead, people are buying both. They are picking up Vanilla Calm and Cacao Boost together, rather than tiptoeing in with one pouch and seeing how it goes, and I have been trying not to read too much into it, because it is one week and a small number of orders, but I also can’t stop thinking about it.

I don’t know yet whether it means people trust the label, or they just can’t choose between vanilla and chocolate, which is a dilemma humanity has been failing to solve for centuries, or something else entirely. What I do know is that it was the moment in the week when GUTSY stopped feeling like something I had made and started feeling like something other people had decided to keep.

Terrified, Mostly

If you had asked me before launch how I expected to feel in the first week, I would have told you excited, proud and probably tired, and I am all of those things, but mostly I am terrified, and I have decided to say that out loud rather than wrap it in a nicer word.

I am terrified in the way you are when something you have been protecting for a long time is suddenly out in the world where other people can touch it. When it was a sample on a kitchen counter, the only people who could be disappointed were the two of us, and now every order is someone who could be disappointed, which is exactly what I wanted and also exactly what keeps me awake. The boxes are late, the merch doesn’t exist and the launch has so far consisted of one video, a lot of deliveries and an unhealthy relationship with the refresh button, and still people are ordering, and ordering both, and that is somehow more frightening than if nobody had ordered at all, because now there is something real to keep.

Week one is done, and the first order was mine. Everything after that, it turns out, belongs to other people, and I am trying very hard to be worthy of it.

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GUTSY is live and delivers across the UAE. Both flavours are at alwaysgutsy.com.