Update on my Entrepreneurial Journey
Last year 2016, I posted on medium about my frustrating startup journey (https://medium.com/@ubaluavalentine/my-frustrating-startup-story-7cd4177177d8) I registered my company in 2011 as a business name and we built various educational products with the aim to finding a lasting solution to the educational problems in Nigeria. The products we built were great (well to us) but we had challenges getting subscribers or customers (guess it wasn’t a priority to them at the time).
Anyways, fast track to 2017, a lot has happened since then and we are grateful to God for his grace in keeping the dream alive and not giving up.
So here is how far we have gone.
We registered Nicademia as a limited liability company in September 2016 because we were ready to bring in investors and we wanted to build an Institution, so it was necessary.
Sometime around April 2017, We had a VC company that wanted to invest $20,000 for 10% equity of Nicademia. We loved the company because of the awesome things they were doing and their interest in really helping startups scale. We really wanted them to be our investors but unfortunately, we couldn’t agree at a conclusion due to the terms of the contract.
This made us sad and learnt alot from the experience. One of the lessons we learnt was that there is a “startup law” that goes completely against the “Nigerian Law” of bringing in investors. A regular Nigerian Lawyer might not understand the terms because it might seem suspicious (e.g vesting, CEO can be sacked, etc)
Another lesson we learnt was that we should have requested for the terms of the contract before going into the acceleration program. It was a 4 months acceleration and $20,000 investment. We have already spent close to 2 months into the program already without signing and we were under alot of pressure (meeting traction and signing the document). I guess this was a mistake on their side as well.
In conclusion, this didn’t stop us from moving on and building the company. I Will tell you what we have accomplished by God’s grace since then. Stay tuned.