My Daily Pocket started over coffee, right after the school drop-off. Lina and I were doing what mums do in that half hour: talking about the chaos of family life. Kids of different ages, all their activities, work, and the personal time that never seems to happen.
We weren’t looking for something to fill our spare time. Neither of us had any. Between our work and our kids, every week was already full. But somewhere in that conversation we found a shared frustration: getting our kids to take their vitamins. The gummies on the supermarket shelf were mostly sugar. The pills were a fight. We wanted something simple that our kids would actually take every day, and we couldn’t find it. So we made it ourselves, out of necessity more than anything else.
Our first small batch is done now, and we’re getting the second one ready. Looking back, I expected the product to be the hard part. It was hard, but so was everything around it: building something together when both of us already had full lives.
Deciding who does what
When you start a business with a friend, the natural instinct is to do everything together. Every decision, every email, every draft goes past both of you. It feels fair. It’s also slow, and it means that whenever one of you is pulled away by family, everything waits.
So we split the work, and each of us owns her part. I look after formulation and most of the marketing. Lina runs shipping, operations and partnerships and handles part of our social media. We still haven’t settled on formal titles, and so far that hasn’t mattered.
The split isn’t fixed, either. Lina found our manufacturer for the first batch. For the second, that has moved to me. What matters is that at any point each of us knows what she owns and trusts the other with the rest.
Some things we still do as a pair. We write our Knowledge Hub articles together, and anything with both our names on it gets read by both of us. But not every supplier email needs two people. Letting go of that frees up hours neither of us really has.
I asked Lina how it looks from her side:
“It’s been a challenging journey, with endless hours of starting from scratch: choosing the brand name, selecting suppliers, deciding on the product format, talking to fulfilment companies and much more. I wanted us to do things right and offer something there’s a real need for but little or nothing of on the market. I wanted us to educate parents the way we educated ourselves along the way. And as a parent, I wanted us to earn the trust of a community I had doubts about. I had to believe in the health and wellness industry again. My kids have been huge supporters too. They come to fairs with us, and they help me see that we’re on the right path. I’m looking forward to our next batch, growing stronger and always pushing for excellence.”
Our toughest critic
The part of this story I like best happened at our kitchen table. Every version of the formula was stirred into a glass of water there, and our kids were the tasting panel.
My 11-year-old daughter is the pickiest eater I know. Anyone who has one at home knows how honest they are about food: there’s no polite sip to keep the grown-ups happy. That made her the most useful tester we could have asked for, and in the end, her verdict decided the flavour of our first batch.
Most days, family and business pull in different directions. Every now and then they meet in the middle, and your daughter ends up settling a product decision.
Guarding family time
Most of the work, of course, is labels, numbers and emails. A business you run from home has no natural edges. Messages come in during dinner. A good idea arrives at bedtime. Without some kind of line, the work quietly spreads into every hour you have.
What helps me is deciding what’s protected before the week fills up: the school run, dinner, the small things I don’t want to look back on and realise I missed. I won’t pretend the weekends are off limits, though. We’re a startup. My weekends are a run of football training and matches, and I spend most of them on the touchline, half watching and half sorting out business decisions.
Then there’s the part I’m less sure about. I use more and more AI tools in my work, and they do make some tasks easier. But the honest result is that I’m tuned in almost all the time. Work isn’t a separate block of my day any more; it’s mixed up with everything else. I’m still working out whether that’s a good thing.
Having a co-founder who is also a mum makes this easier than I expected. Neither of us has to explain why an evening is off limits or why a sick child changes the whole week. When one of us needs to step back for a few days, the other picks things up. When two of my kids were sick at the same time, Lina went to a business event on her own so I could stay home with them. We don’t keep score.
The guilt nobody puts in the business plan
Every working parent knows this feeling. When I’m working, part of me thinks I should be with my kids. When I’m with my kids, part of me is thinking about what I haven’t finished. Starting a business didn’t create that feeling, but it certainly gave it more to work with.
What I’ve slowly learned is to ask which kind of guilt it is. Sometimes it’s pointing at something real, like a moment that mattered to my child that I wasn’t fully present for, and that’s worth fixing. Other times it’s just the gap between my week and some picture of what a “good mum” is supposed to look like. That kind I try to ignore, with mixed success.
Guilt also has a way of putting you last. On the fullest days, everyone at home gets a proper meal, and I finish the kids’ leftovers standing at the kitchen counter. Lina and I wrote about exactly that parent in our Knowledge Hub piece You fed everyone. What did you eat?, and I’m her more often than I’d like to admit. Running a business on top of family life makes that pattern worse, not better. You can’t look after a family or a company for very long if you’ve quietly stopped looking after yourself.
What I’d tell another pair of mums
If you’re thinking of starting something with a friend, choose someone you can disagree with comfortably, because you will disagree about money, timing and priorities.
Ours was about the direction of the business. I’m a firm believer in functional medicine and bioavailability, meaning how much of each nutrient the body can actually absorb. Lina is more pragmatic and wanted to focus on a good product at a good price. In the end we went with my gut: a bioavailable formula, and independent testing by accredited labs as part of how we make every batch.
Talk about time and family before you need to: what happens if one of you has to step back for a month, or a child needs more of you for a while. Those conversations are much easier when nothing is on fire.
Expect your roles to move, too. The split you start with probably won’t be the one you have by your second batch, and that’s fine as long as you both know who’s holding what.
Go easy on yourselves about pace. A business grows slowly when both founders are raising children and doing other work at the same time. Our first batch was small, and that’s fine. Comparing ourselves with founders who don’t have a school run, or with big funded teams, would only make us feel behind.
And keep part of the week that has nothing to do with the business. We made this for our kids, and it would be a strange outcome if it ended up crowding them out.
Some weeks the business gets the best of me, and some weeks it gets what’s left. Having Lina go through the same thing at the same time is what makes it doable.
