I wanted to build something pink. That's probably not the answer people expect.
When founders talk about building for women, the conversation usually moves quickly toward market opportunities, underserved audiences, representation, or demographics. The truth is that none of those explanations fully captures why I started building.
I care about representation. I care about who products are built for. I've spent years thinking about women in technology, product design, and the gap between who products claim to serve and who they actually work for.
I was also tired of using products that all felt the same. I wanted something softer. More editorial. More intentional. Something that felt designed instead of assembled. Something that felt like it belonged to the people using it.
The frustration with existing products. The aesthetics. The questions about who gets considered in design. The feeling that women were often the audience but not the starting point. The belief that software could feel different than it usually does. All of those things were tangled together long before I ever started building.
So yes, I wanted to build something pink. But that was never the whole story.
What surprised me was how quickly aesthetics stopped being the hardest part. Choosing colors is easy. Choosing typography is easy. Deciding how something should feel is surprisingly easy. Deciding who you're building for is much harder.
I thought I was building for women. Then I started trying to define what that actually meant. The answer kept changing.
At first, it felt obvious. Then I started building content. Then recommendations. Then filters. Then personalization. Then support for different dietary needs. Then different countries. Then different cultural assumptions around food. Every decision revealed another decision hiding underneath it.
I would solve one problem and discover three more. I would think I had made the product more inclusive and then realize I had simply expanded one definition of normal while accidentally creating another.
I'm still working on it. There are places in the product where I can see my own assumptions baked in — in the content, in the framing, in what I treated as a default. Noticing those things doesn't resolve them. But I've become convinced that noticing is the first requirement. You can't build from experiences you're not paying attention to.
The longer I worked on Girl Dinner Mode, the more I realized that building for women wasn't about finding a single universal experience. It was about becoming more aware of the experiences I wasn't seeing.
Women are not one lifestyle.
One culture.
One relationship with food.
One set of priorities.
One definition of convenience.
One version of adulthood.
And yet products often force those differences into a single model because products require decisions. Categories. Systems. Rules.
At some point, I stopped asking how to build for women. I started asking which assumptions I was making about them. That turned out to be a much harder question. It also turned out to be a more useful one.
I still care about the aesthetics. A lot. I still want products to be beautiful. I still want them to feel soft. I still want them to feel like they were made with care. But those things are only meaningful if the thinking underneath them is just as intentional.
The longer I build, the less interested I become in whether a product looks like it was made for women. I'm more interested in whether it was built from women's lived experiences in the first place. That feels like a harder problem. It's also the one I actually care about.