In January last year, Adil Abbuthalha launched an app to help people boycott companies tied to Israel amid its brutal genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The app? Boycat, designed to help consumers make informed decisions about what they buy and track their ethical shopping journey.
What started as a simple BDS application, allowing users to scan barcodes on items to find out where it has any affiliations with Israel, began evolving fast.
Surpassing over a million users, divesting $150 million from Israel-linked companies and being in the top one percent of web extensions, Boycat is helping millions of users buy with an ethical conscience.
“When I first launched, I didn’t expect anything like ‘Free Palestine’,” Adil tells The New Arab. “But now I kind of think it’s a reality, just because of how much impact and influence we are gathering very quickly, and we’re able to start expanding. We’re getting to a point where we can really start doing some… I wouldn’t say damage, but we can start influencing decisions and corporations with just our user base and the amount of data we have.”
It all started while the founder was working in Big Tech, feeling a lack of fulfilment in what he was doing and never feeling as if he was directly impacting someone on the other side of whatever he was building.
“I got to a point where I was thinking about how I can make someone across the world have any sort of impact, or how can I make someone across the world directly do something to help someone in Palestine or Gaza itself”
Living in California, home of Silicon Valley, Adil explains it’s a place where everyone is out there to make a quick buck.
“I was just so bored of corporate life, and I was bored of not helping people directly,” Adil tells The New Arab.
Living with this feeling, Israel began its offensive on the Gaza Strip. Adil had an affinity towards helping people who needed it the most and wanted to make an impact.
“I got to a point where I was thinking about how I can make someone across the world have any sort of impact, or how can I make someone across the world directly do something to help someone in Palestine or Gaza itself,” he says.
Adil began thinking. We can mobilise, bring protests together, and write emails, but to Adil, nothing was changing.
“When you dig into it deeper, the reality is, we weren’t speaking the same language as these corporations and governments because they always spoke money, and we didn’t speak money — we were speaking words and emotions and ethos,” Adil explains.
“We can get a protest going today, but that doesn’t actually lead to anything as a result or outcome, and so I wanted to solve that.”
Adil started thinking of ways to help empower people to make change, aiming to create a translator or educate people so they learn a new language.
He wanted to solve three main problems: how do you educate someone without relying on a media cycle, how do you platform alternatives, and how do you change someone’s behaviour?
[Adil Abbuthalha]
At the same time, the designer had a dream one night of arguing with someone about why they bought Starbucks. After being told that “one cup didn’t matter” and not knowing any alternatives, it sparked the idea of helping people boycott – where people refuse to buy certain products because of the company’s affiliations.
“The entire solution to this entire thing is: empower someone to understand their purchasing power and understand how to make someone have, or be able to speak the same language,” Adil explains.
Boycotting has proven to be a vital tool in divesting millions of pounds and dollars from companies with affiliations to Israel and the occupation, and Adil wanted to bring tens of millions of protesters into one platform to show the higher-ups that their affiliations can hurt their pockets.
“I think people think that corporations and governments run a lot of things, but the reality is, people empower them to do those things,” Adil adds.
“If you understand that you have purchasing power and you can empower them to do the right thing instead, that’s the most significant aspect of this.”
Everyone has a phone, and people love apps like Duolingo and games. So why not make an app that provides a tonne of information, expands beyond that, and gamifies it so that it does not become a chore?
After teaching himself how to code using AI, YouTube videos and free Harvard and Standford courses online, Boycat was born.
One year later, users can also track their divestments, search for brands to avoid, and even find local cafes and shops to ensure their shopping is ethical.
The team also recently launched Buycat, a marketplace that acts as a hub for consumers to shop online and in-person businesses without having to think about the product’s affiliations, find ethical alternatives and have a better impact on the world.
“Our goal is to make it as easy as possible,” Adil says. “The reason that people don’t boycott is because it’s difficult, and it’s not an easy thing to do. So, we make it as easy as possible by giving you as many alternatives that are really high quality, all in one place where you don’t have to think about it.”
“Until there’s a completely free Palestine, and there’s no longer an apartheid controlling them, we want to allow people to continue to shop and boycott to dismantle the apartheid state”
While Boycat is taking the digital world by storm, including a collaboration with the BDS campaign, Adil’s success has not come without its challenges.
“I get death threats every week… I mean, just look at the comment section,” he says nonchalantly.
“I got fired,” Adil says from his job at Big Tech after releasing the app and making headlines. “I didn’t say anything about them [Big Tech] or anything. They just knew I was building, and we had some leadership that was apparently very pro-Zionist… that’s how it goes.”
He adds, “It was a blessing because now I can focus fully on doing this; running investors, and going in that direction.”
Not to mention being taken off the Play Store for “spreading misinformation and deceiving users” – despite using Israeli newspapers as their source.
Despite this, Adil tells The New Arab he has one end goal. “I want to get to a point where success for me would mean Boycat never used again,” Adil says.
“That means everyone’s shopping in the cleanest way, that means that all the corporates and governments are making our decisions and it’s not a needed tool. So, the moment we have zero users is the perfect day, which is counterintuitive to what we want to do, but it’s a perfect thing to happen.”
Now that Israel’s genocidal war is at a ceasefire, Adil tells The New Arab the concept of boycotting does not end with a truce, it ends when Israel’s occupation comes to an end.
“Until there’s a completely free Palestine, and there’s no longer an apartheid controlling them, we want to allow people to continue to shop and boycott to dismantle the apartheid state,” Adil says.
The founder also says one of their goals is not to strictly focus on one cause or only one group of people but to help anyone oppressed worldwide.
“We’ll definitely be adding in more causes soon,” Adil says. “One of our goals is not just to be strictly only one cause or only one people, it’s to help anyone that’s oppressed around the world,” adding that within the coming months, Boycat will release more campaigns surrounding the Uyghurs, Congo and climate and sustainability.
The founder says the next step is to continue unifying, gathering people, and making an impact in the corporate world.
“I think we’re at a stage where we are gathering enough influence where we can actually make that a reality, I think that that’s kind of the goal,” Adil says.
“Initially, it was just like, let’s help as many people as we can learn about things, but now, we can really take action, we can really help change how things are run, and make sure nothing ever happens again in the future Inshallah (God willing).”
Anam Alam is a staff journalist at The New Arab. She frequently writes about human rights and social issues, including women’s rights and sex education
Follow her on X: @itsanamalam
