Season 1 of The New Build podcast is officially a wrap! Twelve episodes in, and I’m very proud of what we’ve done here.
The finale is a bit different from our usual format. Instead of one longer interview, Abhinav had three back-to-back conversations with the founders of three different companies. Clover Dogs, Land, and MMARA are all building mobile-first, in completely different industries, for reasons that make a lotof sense once you understand the specific problem each of them is solving.
About the guests
Julian Reeves is the co-founder and CEO of Clover Dogs, a mobile app that uses dating-app swipe mechanics to help people discover rescue dogs available for adoption. He and his wife Alexis built it together — they met on Hinge, which is where the app’s core mechanic comes from.
Andrew Haarsager is the solo founder of Land, a personal climate resilience app he built after seven years as the founding Head of the Retail Innovation Lab at Cartier North America. It’s one part local climate forecasting and one part emergency supply marketplace.
Obi and Onyi Chukwuma co-founded MMARA alongside their sister Crystal. It started as a hair products website in 2020 and has since evolved into a health tracking app for women experiencing hair loss.
What to expect from this episode
The conversations cover a lot of ground, but a few things stand out.
Julian makes an argument about mobile virality that doesn’t get said often enough: After a certain age, the number of people you naturally share things with on a daily basis drops sharply. If you’re building a mobile app that needs social spread and you’re not targeting a younger audience, you’re working against the medium. It’s a useful filter for anyone deciding whether to go mobile or web.
Andrew’s story is really about communication design. His original app looked more like a fitness tracker — risk scores and percentages — and users found it hard to act on. He ended up drawing on the astrology industry as a model: Horoscope apps communicate slow-moving, invisible shifts in contextual, plain-language daily reads, and that turns out to be exactly the right frame for climate data. It’s an unusual reference point, but once he explains it, it clicks.
The MMARA conversation gets into something I think matters a lot right now. Obi points out that launching an AI app has become trivially easy, which means user trust is the actual differentiator — and one that’s very hard to copy. MMARA has deliberately chosen not to build on top of general-purpose AI for health guidance, because those models get women’s health inquiries wrong at a significant rate. They’re building their own. It’s the slower path, but it’s the only one that leads to something clinicians and patients can actually rely on.
Stepping back, what connects all three is that none of them chose mobile as a distribution decision — it was a product design one. The swipe mechanic only works on a phone. You’re not carrying a laptop when you need to evacuate. You won’t open a web app every morning to log symptoms. In each case, mobile shaped what the product could actually be. Function is a meaningfully different reason to bet on mobile, and in my opinion, the more durable one.
Where to listen
Episode 12 is live now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:
If you’ve missed any of Season 1, there’s no better time to catch up on these 12 conversations with founders and industry leaders who are each building in ways that didn’t fit the old playbook.
What kind of guests or businesses would you want to see in Season 2? Tell us below.
— Emmanuel