Two Launches, Two People: Building Oula and GUTSY
Launching Oula, a UAE fashion app, and GUTSY, a Dubai gut health brand, in the same month, and the husband behind all 47 kitchen experiments.
The solo founder is the best story in startups, which is impressive for a story that is almost entirely made up, and I say that as someone who has been telling it about myself, with real commitment and very little evidence, for about a year.
The news that Oula had been approved for the App Store reached me in the middle of recording launch videos for GUTSY, which is exactly the kind of scheduling that happens when you decide, against the advice of every sensible person you know, to launch two companies at once. We’d been filming for hours, long enough that I had started to forget what my face looked like when it wasn’t performing enthusiasm about digestion, and when we finally stopped for a break I picked up my phone to check my email, out of habit rather than hope, the way you check the fridge again even though you know nothing new has appeared in it since four minutes ago.
Something new had appeared in it. One company was sitting in the room waiting for its launch video, and the other had just been cleared to exist, and for about a minute both of them lived on the same phone screen while I stared at it like it might change its mind.
I read the email twice, because the first time my brain flatly refused to process it, and then I did what I always do with significant milestones, which is absolutely nothing for about thirty seconds. Then I took a screenshot and sent it to my husband, who was at work, doing whatever his employer considers more important than my app, and who replied “finally,” with the energy of a man who has heard me say “any day now” more times than either of us would like to put on the record.
He was the first person I told, because he is always the first person I tell, even when he is across the city in a meeting and has to pretend to his colleagues that his phone buzzing is about something serious. It occurred to me, sitting there between takes with my launch-video face still on, that I have never actually written that down anywhere.
If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ve met him, though only ever in the way you meet the guy holding the boom mic in a documentary. He is asleep while I run my first successful command at 3am in The Graduation Nobody Saw, which is the most supportive thing a person can do at 3am. He is in the backyard with me and the dog when the sky makes a sound neither of us has a word for in The Longest March. He is walking the dog with me after bad nights, and he is reliably one of the three people liking my TikToks, the other two being my mother and, on a generous day, someone I went to school with who I suspect liked it by accident.
These are what you might call supporting roles, and I have come to realise that they are actually the load-bearing walls, the bits of the house you don’t notice until you try to take one out and the ceiling starts having opinions. Somebody has to hold the rest of life steady while the other person disappears into a laptop, and in our house that somebody has, with remarkable patience, mostly been him.
The GUTSY section of my own website, which I wrote and then apparently forgot to learn from, says it more plainly than any of my essays have: 47 experiments with my husband. So consider this one the essay catching up with the website.
What’s Actually Launching
Two companies, within a few weeks of each other, alongside a full-time corporate job, which I list in that order because I’d like you to understand the scale of the poor decision-making before we go any further.
Oula is a fashion discovery app for the UAE, and it has just been approved for the App Store and is launching soon. If you have ever opened Namshi, Ounass, Next, H&M and three brand sites in separate tabs to find one black blazer, then spent twenty minutes trying to work out whether AED 640 is a fair price or a personal insult, that is the problem Oula was built to solve. It searches more than 20 UAE stores at once, learns your taste from a short style quiz and the things you save, tells you whether a price is great, typical or high compared with similar pieces, and sends you a nudge when something you saved drops in price, so that you can stop doing what I used to do, which was keep fourteen tabs open for a week and call it research. Love it first, price it second.
GUTSY, the gut-friendly protein from Dubai, went on sale on 1 November 2026, and it exists because supplements made my own gut worse, which is the kind of origin story that sounds noble in a pitch deck and considerably less noble when you are describing it to a pharmacist. It took 47 failed experiments in our kitchen, a manufacturer who took AED 12,000 and then vanished with the commitment of a man who had somewhere better to be, and a stretch in Dubai municipality approvals so long that I have chosen, for my own mental health, not to put the number in writing. There are no proprietary blends, which means everything on the label is everything in the tub, a standard that should be the bare minimum and somehow counts as a differentiator. If you want the full saga, it starts in What I Learned Spending Eight Months Building a Gut Health Product.
Why a Fashion App and a Gut Health Brand
People keep asking me this, usually with the polite, slightly worried expression people reserve for friends who have taken up marathon running, and for a long time I gave them an answer about market gaps that I’m fairly sure nobody believed, including me.
The real answer, which I only worked out recently and which is not a strategy so much as a diagnosis, is that I seem to know how to build exactly one kind of product, and it’s the kind that tells you the truth whether you asked for it or not. Oula tells you when a price is inflated, GUTSY shows you exactly what you are swallowing, and earlier this year I built Frank, an AI whose entire job is to tell me I haven’t thought something through, which it does with a frequency I find personally hurtful. Three products, one deeply consistent personality flaw, and at some point someone qualified should probably look into that.
The Solo Founder Is a Story
There is a story we love to tell about founders, the one where a single person with a laptop and a vision takes on the world, and it’s a great story, it photographs beautifully and it performs very well on LinkedIn, and I have told my own version of it with a straight face. In I Gaslight Myself for a Living I wrote that “your team is you, alone, at 3:30am,” which is exactly how it feels at 3:30am, when everyone sensible is asleep and you are rewriting the same paragraph for the fourth time and eating something cold out of a container.
It is not, however, what it looks like from the outside, and it is definitely not what it looks like in our kitchen, where at any given point in the last year you could have found two people, a dog and an alarming number of measuring spoons.
Every office I have ever worked in runs on the same quiet rule, which is that the person who ships the feature gets the applause and the people who kept the whole launch from falling apart get a line near the end of the all-hands, somewhere between the fire drill reminder and the cake. Nobody means anything by it. Some work is easy to see and some work is easy to take for granted, and the second kind is almost always the reason the first kind was possible. Building something at home works exactly the same way, only with more love, fewer slide decks and significantly less documentation.
So Here Is the Documentation
The kitchen lab was never my lab, no matter how many times I referred to it as “my lab” in a tone that implied lab coats. It was ours. Forty-seven experiments means forty-seven rounds of measuring, mixing, tasting, writing things down in a notebook that is now mostly stains, and washing everything up so that we could do it all again the next evening, and he was there for an unreasonable number of them. He tasted batches I would not have asked a stranger to taste, and I am not entirely sure I would have asked a lawyer to review. He was the one who would put down the glass and tell me, kindly and without a flicker of hesitation, that this one tasted like chalk, and he was right far more often than I enjoyed.
When Oula was a half-working prototype that crashed if you looked at it with too much enthusiasm, he was its first user and by a distance its most honest one. He did not tell me it was great, which is what I wanted, and instead told me exactly where he got lost, which is what I needed and found considerably more annoying. Somewhere on both our phones is a long thread of screenshots with one-line notes underneath them, and a worrying proportion of those notes begin with the words “why does it.”
Then there is everything that doesn’t look like work and absolutely is: the dinners that appeared on nights when I had forgotten dinner was a concept, the dog walked while I was on a supplier call pretending to be calm, the drive across the city to drop off samples, and the questions he asked over dinner that were really the right questions in disguise, phrased so gently that I didn’t notice I was being stress-tested until I had already changed my mind.
And there was a night, somewhere in the long, beige middle of the municipality wait, when I announced, with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who wanted to be talked out of it, that maybe this was the universe telling me to stop. He didn’t argue, and he didn’t give me a pep talk, which I would have hated and he knew it. He just asked what I planned to do with the 47 experiments if I stopped. I did not have an answer to that, which was obviously the point, and the next weekend we were back in the kitchen.
None of that is “support,” however much we like to file it there. It’s work. It just doesn’t come with a job title, a salary or a line in the all-hands.
The Launch Plan Has Two Names on It
I have written a lot of launch plans for other people’s companies, and every single one of them had a column for owners, with a name next to every line, because the fastest and most reliable way to make a launch fail is to pretend that one person can carry all of it while also answering emails. I have been very strict about that column in other people’s companies. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that our own launch plan, the real one, which lives mostly in conversations over dinner and partly in a notes app I refuse to tidy, has always had two names on it.
The corporate job is still there, by the way. In March I wrote that it had started to feel like shelter rather than strategy, and that’s still true; it pays for the formulations and the lab tests and the App Store developer fee, and it also means that everything else happens before 8am, after 7pm and on weekends that stopped being weekends so long ago that I now think of Saturday as a slightly more casual Tuesday. That arithmetic doesn’t work for one person, and I know because I tried it, but it does work for two.
So, for the record, my team is not me, alone, at 3:30am. My team is two people at a kitchen counter on experiment thirty-something, arguing about whether this one tastes like a supplement or a punishment, and it’s one person asleep at 3am while the other one runs a command, which is its own kind of teamwork, because somebody in this house has to be rested enough to drive.
Oula is approved, GUTSY is weeks away, and we built them together.
Thank you for the forty-seven tastings. The forty-eighth is the one we’re actually launching, and I promise, with only moderate confidence, that it tastes good.
Oula is coming soon to the App Store; find it at getoula.com. GUTSY is now live in Dubai; get it at alwaysgutsy.com.