Episode 7 of The New Build: Giselle Gonzales on building a marketplace where the mission and the revenue are the same thing

Announcements
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Hi there,

Episode 7 of The New Build podcast is live. This one is for anyone who’s wondered whether a business can be built around genuine community impact from the ground up — or anyone thinking about how to build a team that thrives on trust and autonomy.

About our guests

Abhinav spoke with Giselle Gonzales, founder and CEO of EqualReach, and Olena Voloshyna, the platform’s product lead. EqualReach is a freelancing marketplace connecting businesses with vetted teams of refugee and displaced talent for project-based digital work. What makes the model unusual is that the platform only earns revenue when refugee talent gets paid, so the mission and the business case are structurally the same thing.

Giselle spent a decade researching digital work among displaced communities before building anything, including running a quiet pilot inside a major tech firm that sent real commercial projects to refugee camps in East Africa.

Olena joined the team when EqualReach was accepted into Bubble’s Immerse program. Giselle needed someone she could trust to build the platform and take part in the cohort on EqualReach’s behalf. Olena brought her own experience as a Ukrainian refugee directly into the way the product is built.

What to expect from this episode

The conversation moves between Giselle and Olena’s personal stories and the thinking behind how EqualReach works, from the model itself to how they hire, build, and keep a small team moving.

Part of that is how you design a business so that your incentives are genuinely aligned with the people you serve, not as a values statement but as a structural decision that shapes every product and commercial choice that follows.

EqualReach also found that perceived risk was just as big a barrier as actual risk, so Giselle’s response was to build the answer into the platform so clients never have to think about it. The reasoning behind that decision is worth hearing for any founder working in unfamiliar territory.

You’ll also hear how Giselle thinks about finding the right people and giving them real ownership from day one, a practical takeaway for founders who are going through early-stage hiring or planning to.

Where to listen

Episode 7 is live now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

We launch new podcast episodes every two weeks. If you (or someone you know) built something on Bubble and want to share the story behind the build, drop it in the comments or submit it here.

— Emmanuel

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Is it possible to split out the Bubble emails so I can unsubscribe from these podcast promotional emails while keeping other emails that come through the “Announcements” category? I have no interest in the podcast marketing but it would be unfortunate to have to turn off all emails in order to stop them.

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@Kent I’ll check with the team on this

Update: the team will review their mailing lists and see if they can optimize audiences better to make sure users get only the announcements they are interested in