The Women Who Made Endless: On Building in Public

When the story of Endless gets told, it usually gets told as mine. The founder story. The move from London. The first year of doing every job myself in Dubai.

That version is true. The fuller version is that the customers, partners, and community who found Endless early have shaped what the platform became.

I want to spend a little time being honest about that.

The customers, who built the playbook

The first women who shaped Endless were the early customers. Women who rented a dress, then came back. Women who told their friends. Women who messaged me after an event with thoughts on what worked and what didn't.

They taught me what to build. I'd had ideas about what women in Dubai wanted from a circular platform. Some of those ideas were right. Quite a few were wrong. The ones that needed correcting got corrected because women told me, often quite directly, what they actually wanted.

The delivery windows. The photography style. The cleaning standards. The communication tone. The events. The rental durations. These were all shaped by feedback from the women who used the platform in the first eighteen months.

They were, in a real way, the co-authors of the product. I owe them an enormous amount.

The team, who are the business

The Endless team is small. It is also, by some distance, the most important thing about the business.

The women who have joined me in building this have brought judgement I don't have. Skills I don't have. Networks I don't have. Working styles that complement mine and, when we get it right, improve it.

Every meaningful jump Endless has made in the last two years has been because someone on the team was willing to take the lead on a problem I either couldn't see, couldn't solve, or didn't have time to. The cleanest version of any business story is the founder narrative. The truest version includes the team.

The partners and brands, who took the bet early

The other group I want to credit are the partners. The brands who agreed to be on the platform when we were unproven. The venues who hosted our first events. The photographers, stylists, models, and creatives who came in early, often for less than they were worth, because they believed in what was being built.

Building in a new market means asking a lot of people to take a bet on you. The fact that so many women did, repeatedly, has shaped the kind of brand Endless gets to be.

I think about that when I'm deciding which way to take the business next. The trust that other women have extended to us is not a small thing. The decisions I make have to be worthy of that trust.

The community, who carried the word

The Endless community has grown in a way I didn't plan and couldn't have engineered. Women have brought their friends. Their sisters. Their colleagues. Their daughters.

What that looks like in practice is a community that introduces itself. Someone arrives at an event because their best friend insisted she come. Someone joins the Club because she saw a post from a woman she admires. Someone reaches out to partner because three different women in her circle had recommended the brand.

The compounding of that, over two years, is what has made Endless real. We have not bought our way into the market. We've been carried into it, woman by woman.

That is the version of growth I'm proudest of, and it's the version I'm most determined to protect.

Building in public

There's a phrase that gets used a lot in tech - "building in public" - which usually means sharing your progress publicly while you build. I've come to use the phrase in a slightly different way.

Building in public, for me, means building openly enough that other women can see how it's done, what works, what hurts, what was harder than it looked. It means being honest in interviews. Writing posts like this one. Sharing the unglamorous parts alongside the wins. Letting the next female founder see a real example, not a polished one.

I want to be useful to the women coming after me, and honest with the women who are building alongside me right now.

That's what I mean when I say Endless is being built in public.

A warm thank you

If you've been part of this, you'll know. The customers, the community, the partners, the friends who picked up the phone in the harder months.

Thank you. You have shaped what this has become. And I'm glad we get to keep building it.

You can see what we've made so far at Endless.