The Unending Passion for Building
Hey everyone, Afolabi here. This is my first article, ever. But i didn’t just want to write any article. I wanted to relive (2020, 2021 and 2022) which were some of the craziest years of my life so far (P.S: i’m just 20 (2023), so i haven’t lived much). So are you ready ? of course you are, lets start from the top
2020/2021
I started the year with high dreams; I still believe 2020 and 2021 were the same year, so I merged them into one. So back to the story: at that time, I was still a student at Babcock University studying software engineering; life was good. The only thing terrible about that year was COVID—it was a horror show, people couldn’t move around, and I wasn’t really bothered by the whole thing. In 2019, I spent my time working on a fun project (a social network) called “The Finder” with my friend "Divine”. He is a full-stack engineer, and he had shown me an e-commerce site he built while he was in his town with his cousin. By the way, this was 100 level, so you can imagine what was on my mind when he showed me that. I was livid, and that’s where it all started. Personally, I didn’t really know what I wanted; I could code, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t for me, and I was clearly better at being a generalist around operations.
Fast forward to 2021, and me, Divine, and the rest of the squad that had met throughout 2019 and 2020 had built two projects—one was an e-library called Domstack, and the second was an anonymous messaging website called Truetalk. We quickly became of importance, and we were merely doing it for the fun of it.
Back in 2020, I had met someone named "Timilehin" He was the course rep for computer science, and I had quickly taken a liking to him. He was smart, knowledgeable, knew his onions, and we always had interesting conversations. So in 2021, Divine met me and said we hadn’t built anything fun in a while, and he wanted us to at least build a project for our CV; that project would be today known as "Cloudiby"—our first failed startup. Cloudiby was a file storage platform that allowed people to store and share files with their friends. So when we initially created it, we wanted to be different from the likes of Google Drive and Dropbox, so we added a file messaging feature where you could share files with anyone else on Cloudiby using their username without having to share a link. Our value proposition was for it to be used by students and teachers to manage and share files accordingly and escape the unscrupulous stress of the likes of WhatsApp, where files get lost easily. It simply failed because it was a solution looking for a problem—a tarpit idea in retrospect.
2022
This was the year everything changed. I came into the year not even with an inkling of what was going to happen. Maybe that’s why the year was so great—the fact that I didn’t plan it, and it was also my IT year, so I left a lot of room for excitement. Let’s go back a little
At the end of 2021. Divine came to me with an idea—since our Cloudiby days were behind us, he found a new problem and was excited to show me. At first glance, when he told me how businesses couldn’t accept transfers, why that was, and the solution he came up with, I was wowed. At least this time, it was an actual solution to a problem that even I personally faced. He named it "RunTransfer” and that was such a great name. Divine has this great intuition for creating excellent names. The first stage of our process was to validate the idea, and it wasn’t an easy task. We first asked on Twitter, and everyone that replied validated that as a consumer, it’s an issue they were facing and transfer were convenient then but not as reliable as Card. Secondly, we wanted to ask the businesses themselves; Divine wasn’t around physically, which meant i and another member of the team had to become salesmen. We went along the streets of Oba Akran Avenue and Ikeja GRA to go to restaurants and stores and talk to the store managers or cashiers about whether accepting transfers was a problem for them, and they all validated what we were building, and we then offered our "solution.” The craziest part about this was that we hadn’t even finished building it, so we collected their contacts so we could contact them and keep in touch till it was ready. So some of the business managers we talked to gave us feedback on why it couldn’t work for them and whether it was valid.
So we went back to the drawing board with what they said, and it was something we didn’t initially think about, but from that day on, I really understood the importance of customer feedback in an agile way and what an MVP really meant. We found a solution to the problems they brought up not long after and iterated on our solution. Months later, Paystack emailed us, and guess what? We needed a license or at least a financial partner to run our solution, which was even our smallest problem. We had talked to investors (VCs and angels) who were ready to put in money because they believed we could build this, but it all came down to two things: either we leave school to build this or we build it later, knowing someone could build it before we were ready. (P.S. Yes, someone ended up building it in 2023, and it was two of the biggest fintech companies in Nigeria.). So me and Divine made the hard decision to leave RunTransfer. Throughout 2022, I dabbled in multiple projects, startups, and communities (GenZTechies), so this kept me occupied when I left RunTransfer.
It was September again, and I had to resume school. At that point, I had no picture in my mind of doing anything startup again until Trakka happened. Remember Timi from 2020? Yes, he founded Trakka in late 2021 to solve a problem he was personally facing where he didn’t always know what he spent on across all his different financial accounts at month end, and it was something a lot of people also faced, including me. I had followed up with Trakka since 2021 because Timi came to me to talk about the idea when he started building it. Coming back to early 2022, I decided to double down on product management—I already had some form of experience, but I needed to polish my skills to be good at it. Late 2022—Timi knew I had grown as a PM and told me to come onboard the team to lead product efforts, as he was quickly drenched in his CEO work. I happily joined the team and quickly started trying to understand the vision, value proposition, and strategy so I could be in alignment with the team.
At this same time, I met another interesting individual; his name is "Gift" and he and his team had just built a food delivery app called “Chao” for Babcock University. The reason why this was perfect timing was because I spent the year building a “project” with some other people for this exact same problem. Students wanted food delivered to where they were. The stress of going to the restaurant or store to buy it was a hassle, so when I saw that this team had already built out an MVP that students were using, I wanted to help them as much as I could. I quickly met Gift, and he introduced me to the rest of the amazing team members. It kicked off—in the beginning, I helped with the overall business strategy—just making sure that we were going in the right direction, and quickly after, I joined the Chao Team on contract. Back in May, when I left RunTransfer, I wouldn’t have imagined that I would have ended the year with two interesting roles, but I guess life had other plans. Would I be a founder again? Maybe or maybe not, but only the future knows what it holds for me. Thanks for reading. My 2023 article is already out, but I wanted to take you back in time to see where it all began.
