🚀 Everydaymoney stable release, day 1

So, yesterday we transitioned Everyday Money to a stable release intentionally made to coincide with Retnan’s (4yo) birthday. It’s been 4 months since we made a subtle announcement about being on Playstore and Appstore in an “if you know you know” manner.

By this time, i had run out of money to sustain the team structure that Levi Brian and I had setup from November last year. I had begun to default on payment of salaries and that was not funny as Naira continues to fall against the dollar, subsidy removed, cost of transportation was increasing by the day and by extension the pressure to pay the outstanding continues to grow. I didn’t have a stable job and invoices i had issued out were not getting cleared-out as the businesses too had their own financial challenges. We couldn’t go full scale marketing when we hit the stores as expected not because we wanted to control the number of signups so we could gather feedback, talk to customers, improve and iterate as we should.

To get out of that pressure is a matter of reducing the staff strength since most of the features that we wanted to go live with had been built. This means, letting go of the 2 UI/UX developers that we had, and no longer in need of marketing. The social media guy and the graphics designer have put out an excellent image of the brand on social media however, we had to let them go as well. This is why within this period, there’s not been activity on social media. Meanwhile, 16kilobyte who was just co-funding the startup had to come in to take over from Obie3 whom i can no longer afford. As for 16kilobyte, you know doing a full time job while contributing to a startup is slow but i would take that over the pressure.

Blessing in disguise

In past four (4) months, we have been iterating, talking to customers, improving the products, also exposing the API for third party integrations, also deciding if Everyday Money wallet or your Moneybag should have a bank account number (interface) or not. Put here, remove it and oh please put it back… Plus i have been writing too and documenting as much as i can about Everydaymoney having been dragged by Johnstone for not documenting my side of the story with respect to the rise of the Tech ecosystem in Northern Nigeria.

While at beta, we continued to gain new sign ups through word of mouth and after JohnPaul invited me to Cresthub’s Founder Mixer event to talk on Building from the North.

Believe me you that if we had more than the 200 users that we have since the EverydayMoney beta, we would be overwhelmed by the number of supports which we didn’t have the capacity to respond to. That will not be so good. Because, problems can scale too.

Problems can scale too.

Four (4) Months Later

I would like to thank the people who signed up and were subject to experimentation without which we would not be able to attain a certain level of confidence in Everydaymoney. That is 200+ people who are intentional about their finance and need to get rid of financial fragility that is plaguing us.

With respect to EverydayMoney Business, we exposed our API so that businesses could accept money from their customers during which we were able secure two partnerships namely, Autogas Nigeria, an organization that’s helping Nigerians transition to gas as an alternate fuel for automobiles, plants and domestic use; University of Jos Student Union, student body of the university of Jos where we help them collect the compulsory annual dues from students.

Prior to this time, I had informed Robin Baktok to resign from his position at Sterling Bank to join Everyday Money as Chief Financial Officer. Robin served as our account officer from 2017 during the Pie.ng era and would later join us to help with the financial books.

Listen

The Covid19 Pandemic showed us “shege”, no one saw it coming leaving so many people financially fragile. That was a problem in grande scale, it was a moment to reflect on how a problem so little can scale and providing the necessary technology tools like Everydaymoney to combat it.

Headover to Playstore and Appstore to download everydaymoney or on the website to download directly.

Join us as we are just getting started. This is day 1.