"Are you only looking to hire women in your core team?” I said no. Here's what I wish I said:
I pitched Maibel last week at a founder demo night organized by 8 Circle, WisdomCircle and Singapore Global Network (SGN).
From AI-powered vertical strawberry farms to ChatGPT for functional hardware prototypes, the room was brimming with innovation.
Then came the Q&A after my pitch. I've been thinking about this since I walked off stage.
What if I said yes?
What if my entire team was ONLY women?
Would that be radical? Or would it just look like... every tech company that's "coincidentally" 87% male and calls it "meritocracy"?
When a startup is all men, it still falls within the category of "we hired the best."
When you intentionally build for women, it's potentially divisive. Interesting how that works.
Here's my real answer: No, we're not only hiring women.
But I'm looking to build a team who understand that "default user" doesn't mean "male user"... even though that's what most products assume.
A team who knows that when AI is trained on datasets where women are underrepresented, it produces biased outputs.
(Ask any image generator to show you a "CEO" and count how many ties you see.)
A team who notices that "building for everyone" usually means building for men and then running a focus group to figure out why women don't adopt.
(I wrote about the systemic ways AI inherits our biases and calls it intelligence recently - link in comment.)
This isn't abstract for Maibel. It's the whole point.
We're building an AI companion that understands women's actual behavior patterns - not retrofitted assumptions about what women "probably" want.
Look, the data doesn’t lie:
Across 19,832 messages from real users over 3 beta waves, our power users sent 16-22 messages per day on Maibel.
But we also learned EXACTLY where the product failed.
Women want emotional connection FIRST, wellness second. The users who trusted our companion crushed their healthy habit missions.
Users intentionally took post-dinner walks. Got off one stop earlier to take a longer route home. Drank more water.
The ones who didn't connect didn't care how good the coaching was (or how hot my oppa companion was designed to be.)
Women don't need another productivity tool. They need a companion who actually remembers, who carries conversations, who doesn't create MORE invisible labor.
Maibel is being rebuilt around that core insight.
Now I'm looking for someone to drive the build alongside me.
Here's what that looks like:
→You've built 0 to 1 before (bonus if you've worked with AI/ML or conversational design)
→You're comfortable building without a playbook (because underserved markets don’t have one)
→You're energized by the idea of joining an AI-native team to build solutions that better women's lives
If that's you (or sounds like someone you know), let's chat.
Hi, I’m Mabel.
I’m the founder of Maibel. I write about emotional AI, women’s wellness and learning to build the things I wish existed.
More about me