Resigning, launching, and growing a baby at once. The messy, funny reality behind building MyGuideGuru, and why we kept going anyway.
People keep asking what it’s like building a start-up while pregnant. The honest answer is that it feels like running two projects with the same deadline, except one of them kicks you from the inside while the other kicks you via app store rejection emails. Somewhere in that chaos, MyGuideGuru was becoming real, and so was our next baby, right alongside it.
And yes, it’s as intense as it sounds. There were days I’d be replying to user feedback with one hand, holding a snack for a toddler with the other, and trying not to throw up in between. Glamorous founder life, but make it nausea.
The idea behind MyGuideGuru started the way a lot of good travel ideas start, by being mildly annoyed. We loved discovering places on foot, but we hated the parts that made it harder than it needed to be: rigid times, big groups, and that feeling of being herded past something interesting because the schedule says “next stop”.
We wanted the freedom of a self guided tour, but with the spark of a great storyteller. Not a dry list of facts, more like the kind of story you’d tell a friend as you duck down a side street and point at a doorway, saying, “Right, this is where it all went wrong…”
Then I got pregnant again, right in the middle of resigning from my job and preparing to launch. Suddenly the timeline wasn’t just ambitious, it was slightly unhinged. My body was building a human while my brain was trying to build a product, and both were extremely demanding clients.
Starting a business without an office sounds romantic until you realise your “workspace” is also where you eat, fold laundry, and negotiate with a two-year-old about why the laptop is not, in fact, a drum.
The days had a particular rhythm. Early morning would be the calm patch, tea going cold, messages to developers, notes scribbled in a half-legible rush. Then the house would wake up properly and it became a cycle of childcare logistics, snack requests, and suddenly remembering you have a call in three minutes and you’re still wearing a shirt with something suspicious on it.
The funny part is that having no structure forces you to invent structure. You learn to grab momentum when it appears. You stop waiting for the perfect uninterrupted hour, because it doesn’t come. You take the wins in small chunks: a feature working, a story landing just right, an audio segment that makes a place feel alive.
If you like the behind-the-scenes origin thread, you might also enjoy reading about how it all began in Catching the Travel Bug and the Origins of MyGuideGuru and Why We Built MyGuideGuru: A Founder Travel App Story.
Pregnancy has a way of stripping everything back to essentials. You can’t brute-force your way through a day the way you might have in your twenties. You have to prioritise, simplify, and accept that some days the only productive output is “I stayed upright and fed everyone”.
That mindset shaped how we thought about travel too. Because travellers, especially parents, solo explorers, and people on work trips, don’t want complicated. They want something that fits into real life. They want to step out of a hotel lobby and instantly know which direction leads to something worth seeing, and what the story is once they get there.
That’s the heartbeat of a self guided tour done well. It needs to be flexible, story-driven, and forgiving. Pause whenever. Take a detour. Stop for a coffee. Keep going. Nobody’s glaring at you for “slowing the group down”.
There’s a point in every start-up where you go from talking about what you’re building to facing the reality of it. The reality looks like tiny decisions that stack up fast: how the tour flows, how the map behaves when you drift off route, how the audio feels in your headphones when the street is loud and your attention is split.
We obsessed over those details because they’re the difference between something you try once and something you actually use. You quickly realise that travellers don’t just want information, they want confidence. They want to feel like they’re in the right place, at the right time, and not missing the point.
If you’re curious about the AI side of how that personalisation comes together, our posts How AI Is Revolutionising Walking Tours in 2025 and What Makes a Tour Truly Personalised? The Power of AI in Travel unpack the thinking without the tech jargon headache.
Then there’s the personal pattern we can’t ignore: we seem to do big projects at big life moments.
During my first pregnancy, we were renovating. Not the cute “paint a wall” kind of renovating, more the “why is there dust in places dust should never be?” kind. We finished the nursery after the due date, which, in hindsight, is iconic behaviour. Lucky our son was late.
So maybe building MyGuideGuru while pregnant wasn’t an accident. Maybe we’re just wired to create things in the messy middle, when life is loud and imperfect and you have to commit before you feel ready.
There were moments, especially in that first trimester fog, when everything felt heavy. The kind of tired that sits behind your eyes. The kind of day where making one decision feels like making thirty.
But there was also this steady, energising feeling underneath it all: we were building something we genuinely wanted to exist. A way for travellers to hear the stories behind the photos they take. A way to explore without crowds, without rigid schedules, and without the pressure to “do it properly”.
A self guided tour should feel like freedom, not homework. If we could help someone step out into a city and feel instantly more connected to it, even if they’ve only got an hour before a meeting or a toddler meltdown, then the chaos at our dining table was worth it.
Launching while pregnant taught me there’s never a perfect time to start. There’s only the time you choose, and the willingness to keep adjusting as you go. It’s tiring, it’s funny in hindsight, and it’s oddly beautiful when you realise you’re building two futures at once.
If you want more on how self-guided exploring fits into real travel days, you might like Why Business Travellers Are Turning to Self-Guided Tours. And if you’re ready to try it yourself, download MyGuideGuru and take a walk that actually fits your schedule, your pace, and your curiosity.
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