On the Raft with Jules Falk O’Leary, COO
Jules will be the first to tell you she had no business helping building a reflux brand. She’ll also be the first to tell you that’s exactly why it works. As COO, she’s allergic to the status quo and refuses to let good enough be good enough. We asked her a few questions. Here’s what she said.
Wine. Craft beer. And now... reflux relief. GERD isn’t exactly a glamour category — so why has this been so exciting to work on?
“I challenge anyone to mention GERD at a dinner party and not have the entire room instantly chime in. It truly spares no one… CEOs, athletes, pregnant women, your healthiest friend. There’s something disarming about a condition that’s so universal yet so rarely talked about openly. That’s actually what makes it such a fascinating brand problem. The stigma is the opportunity.”
What's the part of this job nobody warns you about?
“Nobody warns you about the weight of it. We're not medicine — we're very clear about that. But the people who find RefluxRaft find us because they're in pain and they need something to work. That changes how you think about everything. Every product decision, every piece of copy, every review you read. When someone is trusting you with something as personal as their daily comfort and quality of life, you feel that responsibility. I didn't expect to feel it this acutely (thank god for night cream), but I'm glad I do. I think it makes us better."
What’s something you were completely wrong about in the early days that you’ve since done a 180 on?
“Amazon. Most of my background is DTC, so I came in with a bias toward owning the customer relationship end to end. What I’ve since come to understand is that no one competes with Amazon — and if that’s your strategy, you’ve already lost. Customers shop where they want to shop. The smartest thing a brand can do is meet them there, make it seamless, and resist the urge to control something you never could in the first place.”
You’re building a brand in a category most people don’t think about until they’re in pain. What’s the creative challenge in that?
“The interesting thing about reflux is that its most common triggers are genuinely the best parts of life: great food, a good drink, a hard workout, even pregnancy. So the creative challenge isn’t really about pain, it’s about joy. When you position relief as the thing that lets you fully participate in life, the content writes itself. And when you dig into the reviews and see how many people we’ve genuinely helped — not just inconvenienced less, but actually helped — it stops feeling like marketing or sales. It feels like a mission.
What’s a decision you made early on that looked crazy at the time and turned out to be right?
“The very first note in my onboarding audit was: ‘the bottle needs to go.’ Walking into a room with two physician co-founders and a CEO who had poured themselves into their product and saying — hey, love what you've built, now let's blow it up — takes a certain kind of confidence that I’ll admit was partly instinct and partly stubbornness. But I believed the brand we could build was bigger than the packaging we were in. That work is live now. It’s early days but I’m confident it was the right call.”
You’ve been open about struggling with impostor syndrome — what helps you tackle it, and what would you say to anyone reading this who feels the same?
“I've developed alter egos for different situations (shout out to my coach Aennette at Thrive for that strategy, and many others!). When you're a woman and a high-achiever, it's easy to look around a room and sometimes feel like everyone else has it figured out. So whether that's Siobhan saying no or Gwen standing up to BS (names have been changed for anonymity!), create an alter ego and let them do the thing you're too in your head to do yourself.
I also have a sign on my desk that says: No one knows what they're doing.
80% of food and beverage brands never reach $1 million in sales. We have. That's not nothing. If there were a clear step-by-step process to building a winning business, more people would be successful. So when I feel over my skis — or what I like to call 'fraud-life' — I remind myself: no one knows what they're doing. That's not cynicism. That's actually the most liberating thing I've ever learned!”
We are lucky to have her on the raft!
Want to share your RefluxRaft story? Email Jules at hello@refluxraft.com! And stay tuned for more On the Raft with... coming soon.
