SQUARE ONE — THE IDEA APOCALYPSE

OJOAWO SOLOMON
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

About 15 months ago, I set out to solve a major work challenge I was constantly faced with - Submitting work reports on time.

There were so many contributors to my constant delay in submission. However, the major causes are the Long distance to get some of the information sometimes required and limited internet connectivity in most of the places I need to report from.

So I set out to develop a simple android software that will enable me save information per required entity including pictures, and can generate any required report for all these several entities in a single excel sheet. This will save me the time required to start compiling these reports in excel which sometimes run into hours.

As I had no programming skill, I started learning android development via various books and on Udacity via an ANDELA sponsored training and developed as I learnt. As I had little free time to do this due to work - I reduced my sleep hours by 2hours everyday and dedicated every single free time I had to do this and did this alone.

Over time, I envisioned a bigger picture - An Android/Windows Cloud based Enterprise Asset Management Software that will naturally make me and my colleagues over 80% more efficient in delivering real time work reports and updates and allow us more focus on the engineering end of things.

And if the software was adopted by the company, it will generally improve overall performance and most importantly accountability.

And after sampled research across other companies, I realized this was potentially going to be a big disruption in the way Maintenance Contractors of Nigerian Telecoms Companies operate.

It was going to be revolutionary, and it could be offered as a SaaS product that is enough to launch a very successful startup.

On August 15th this year, I finally finished building a very basic android application with all the features I originally had in mind and had completed very comprehensive proposal, usage document, complete spec document of the finished product I envision, strategy documents and almost everything I had written over the 15months I labored on this.

I planned a very big next day. I was going to work on a Pitch, I was going to send out this alpha version of the software I made to colleagues to test and give me feedbacks, I was going to send out lot of emails to a lot of people. I was ecstatic.

I was fully convinced I had my big break. I slept in the early hours of Wednesday August 16th hoping to wake up on top of the world.

But I was awoken roughly in few hours to a very depressing reality.

I had just been robbed. And the robbers made away with my Laptop, and my phones.

Everything I had worked on ever was on that Amazing Lenovo Laptop, including other ideas I was developing; alongside the goldmine I believed to have developed.

In this moment of what I thought was the worst moment of my life already - an even worse reality dawned on me

... "I HAD NO EXTERNAL BACKUP OF ALL OR ANY OF MY WORK"...

It was the worst single moment in History and easily the worst day of my life yet.

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I hope to start the project all over again as soon as I am able to get another Laptop.

Hopefully this time I will not have to do this alone, and with enough running backup to survive an alien invasion.

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