The Chronicles of Fidia: Post-Mortem Edition
A story about Fidia's journey and the cause of her quiet death.
In Q4 2019, I was part of a training somewhere in the middle of Ogun. I had much free time and a constant power supply to design, write articles, and do contract work. Most of the payment for my contract work was made through barter or Flutterwave payment links, Xoom, Sendcash, Payooner, and sometimes wire transfer, depending on which channel worked best. That period made me think about an idea where people who found my articles or design assets could send me a tip as a thank-you for creating the free stuff I put out. Then I discovered BuyMeACoffee and Ko-fi, but I couldn’t use them because they paid out through Stripe or PayPal, which didn’t work here then.
The COVID-19 lockdown started in early 2020, and I had more time to work on different projects. I reached out to one of the folks in a local tech community I was part of and asked him if it made sense for us to build a web app where people could get paid for doing what they love, and before we knew it, we started setting up a team.
Setting up the Team
I reached out to Ajibola Akelebe, with whom I have worked on many projects, to come in as a brand designer to handle logos, banners, and motion graphics. Muhammed Iyiola, a backend developer, contacted Gbadebo Bello to join the team as a frontend developer. He also invited another guy to support him on the backend.
We initially named the project MemberPay before changing it to Fidia.
Design and Implementation
After some tweaks to communications and ironing out the project idea, I started designing the UI for the dashboard and landing pages, and the frontend implementation started as well.
I designed a waitlist landing page, and the frontend was implemented with vanilla JavaScript by Gbadebo, while the backend was implemented with Laravel PHP by Iyiola.
On July 22, 2020, we publicly rolled out the waitlist page for potential users to sign up to get early access to Fidia.
Without much further ado, Iyiola left the project voluntarily for personal reasons, and the other backend developer had to go because he joined through Iyiola, who wasn’t part of the team anymore.
We went back to square one; I did a UI redesign, and Gbadebo rewrote both the frontend in VueJS and the backend in NodeJS because the first backend implementation was done in Laravel PHP. No one remaining on the team knows Laravel.
In January 2021, we decided to strip down all the features and focus on shipping one feature at a time. We started with a payment link feature, and by June 2021, we were able to have something ready to be rolled out.
We had some delays on the launch due to our pending CAC registration that we wanted to use to set our Flutterwave account live. Fortunately, by July 17, 2021, we had launched the first version of Fidia publicly, and we started doing cold outreach and talking to users who had signed up for the waitlist to get them onboard with the newly launched product.
After the public launch, the payment link signalled the start of many features we had in mind. We started migrating the codebase from VueJS to NuxtJS because we needed SSR capabilities for things like SEO, dynamic OG images, etc.
We hired our first engineer, Victor Sanusi, as an independent contractor who supported Gbadebo on the engineering side, and we shipped more stuff faster. We turned his contract into a full-time job when we raised funding in December 2021.
Flutterwave
We picked Flutterwave as our payment processor because they are supported in many African countries and requested minimal documents for compliance when we started. We experienced some issues with them down the line, but they allowed us to go live and start processing payments, which was a good deal for us.
Creator Profile
On November 1, 2021, we launched the first version of the Creator Profile—an online portfolio for creators to showcase their works, follow and connect with other creatives, get support and tips from their fans, and accept work requests from potential clients. It was like Behance with built-in payment functionalities.
QR Code Generator
We implemented a simple static QR code generator, which was a way to generate free, fixed, and downloadable QR codes for Fidia payment links.
The feature was inspired by a tweet I came across that shows how a coffee production factory added a QR code to their package design to enable willing customers to support them by sending tips and donations directly to the farmers who work at the factory. The money may or may not get to the farmers, but you get the idea.
Product Pages
On December 3, 2021, we launched Product Pages, which allow Fidia creators to sell digital products online.
Integrations
On December 9, 2021, we launched integrations—a way for creators to connect their websites with third-party applications. The initial integrations we added included two analytics tools: Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.
P2P Transfers
On December 21, 2021, we launched Transfers, a way for creators on Fidia to send money to another creator using only their username.
Fundraising
In December 2021, we were accepted into OnDeck ODX Accelerator and got $125,000—the funding acted as a catalyst, which we used to build the product and hire new folks.
Firstbase, Mercury, Grey and Brass
We used Firstbase to incorporate Fidia as a Deleware C-Corp and then used the documents to open a Mercury US Bank account.
Grey enabled us to wire money from Mercury into our virtual USD account in Grey and then use it to convert the money into Naira. After converting the money into Naira, we use Brass to disburse salaries to our employees and pay for other necessary stuff.
Hiring
Recruiting is hard, even harder when hiring non-technical folks like marketing talents. It isn’t easy to measure what they can do until you work with them, and sometimes resumes don’t do justice to that because we humans exaggerate our capabilities to get opportunities.
We had to schedule meetings with partners at OnDeck and Braintrust to get insights on navigating the process. We should have acted more swiftly in letting people go, which cost us a lot of money. Implementing a paid work trial period could have helped us determine if they aligned with our goals.
Remote-First
We were a 100% remote company, and the interesting part was that I hadn’t met half of the team in real life. We tried to organize company off-site events, but every attempt was always met with other plans or tasks we needed to take care of. Most of our conversations were on Basecamp and Google Meet.
Basecamp
We used Basecamp for communication, project management, and collaboration. Many teams used Slack and other tools, but we decided to use a platform that encourages asynchronous communication and expressive writing. We were fully remote, with less than two meetings per week, three days of written check-in status reports every week, and a mandatory weekly round-up every Friday. The subscription plan we used cost a thousand dollars per year.
Creator Profile 2.0
The Creator Profile was upgraded from a portfolio that showcases projects to a free link-in-bio website builder that allows creators to create a one-page website to showcase their work, grow, and get paid from anywhere in the world without writing a single line of code.
We initially aimed to develop the website builder as a separate product. I designed the first version, and a separate repository was created on GitHub. However, after considerable thought, I internally advocated for integrating it with the creator profile feature and transformed it into a website builder. One of the primary reasons behind the suggestion was the potential for seamless integration with our payment and commerce tools, which made it more efficient as we progressed.
Verification Badges
We added a way for creators on Fidia to get a verified badge next to their name on every public page they create with Fidia, which is very exciting. Those verification badges were only available internally and to specific creators.
Referrals
On April 22, 2022, we added referrals to reward creators who invite another creator into Fidia and earn one thousand naira for each sign-up. This was a bad idea, which I was sceptical of signing off on. We later scraped it when we noticed patterns of people trying to game the referral system.
Merch Boxes
We did merchandise, which was cool! Ajibola worked with the WiiCreate team to create the initial batch, which they produced and sent to us.
During onboarding, new team members received merch boxes, and we distributed them to users who spread the word about Fidia as well as influencers with whom we collaborated.
Ajibola recreated some merchandise designs for us when we wanted to exhibit at the 2022 Ogun Digital Summit; however, Seun from OJSNeedle printed them this time.
Influencer Marketing
Hmm. LOL!
We tried this, and the whole process was fun, but it didn’t work for us to convert into the numbers we needed. We got traffic to the landing pages, but there was no real usage of the product.
It was as if we just lit money on fire. There was even an influencer we paid who only delivered one task and didn’t reply to our messages again.
Creator Profile — Design Editor
On May 13, 2022, we updated the creator profile to allow users to customize the background, font, and button styles of one-page websites created with Fidia.
Recurring Payments
On May 30, 2022, we updated the payment links feature to include monthly recurring payments, allowing fans to support any creator every month with an amount specified by the creator or a custom amount selected by the fan.
This update was also included in the existing payment links created before the new update, and all that the person attempting to make the payment needs to do is select the current payment link, toggle to the right side of the bar to choose monthly, fill in the remaining information, and proceed to the payment.
Invoicing
On June 22, 2022, we launched Invoicing after surveying creators on Fidia. We learned that receiving payment wasn’t enough for larger-scale creators and that creating a feature that bills and records these transactions would be essential. With this in mind, we built Invoicing to help creators bill their clients professionally while also tracking the payments they receive.
Creator Spotlight
On August 8, 2022, we published our first creator spotlight story. The goal was to share creators’ stories to motivate other creators to see their favourites in a new light, the behind-the-scenes content and mind-blowing creativity they put out, and also get to know how they were using Fidia.
Improvements
On August 16, 2022, we rolled out a series of improvements, including a new website with updated messaging and KYC.
KYC (Identity Verification)
We noticed a sudden spike in our transaction volume. We initially didn’t take it seriously because we thought it was an average user. Still, after more investigation, we realized that some users were moving money around and taking advantage of a loophole in our implementation.
We quickly turned off the source of the loophole, added safeguards, and implemented identity verification with IdentityPass—Prembly so that those who signed up are who they say they are and can receive money, but won’t be able to perform any other transactions or withdrawals until their identity is verified.
Some users tried using stolen identities to verify their accounts even after adding this. Once we traced these patterns, we responded by freezing their wallet balances and blocking their IP addresses, related email addresses, names, and bank accounts.
We also added an OTP step to withdrawals from Fidia, which served as an additional layer of security. An OTP will be sent to the user’s email address, and once the OTP is provided, the withdrawal will be initiated.
Internal Tools
While some prefer using tools like Metabase or Retool for their internal or admin dashboards, we built ours from scratch simply because we could. It didn’t receive as much attention as our customers' platform, but it functions well. We built stats cards, metric graphs, security and privacy restrictions, and feature flags into the admin tool.
At one point, we considered turning it into a separate tool that other teams could use to deploy their internal admin dashboard tools easily, but after a while, we decided to ignore the idea. Interestingly, we might revisit the idea in the future.
New Website Blocks
The creator profile, renamed to websites, became one of our most popular features on Fidia and was significantly improved by adding new section blocks such as text, images, music links, digital products, a mailing list, a contact form, and many more.
Analytics
In addition to the number of views, clicks, traffic sources, and top locations in our inbuilt analytics for websites created in Fidia, we added two new data points—top links and top socials.
Website Spotlight
In September 2022, we started the idea of a weekly social media post aimed at spotlighting beautiful websites made with Fidia. Every one of the posts contained the name of the person or business, the description or information about the person or business, their Fidia website URL, and a screenshot of their Fidia website. We did this by picking a day of the week dedicated to posting the website spotlights and then adding the hashtag #MadeWithFidia to the posts to track all the websites on social media.
Alternatives
I prefer to call competitors ‘alternatives’ because there’s always something different about them. It’s interesting and fun to see that, most of the time, everyone ends up copying each other.
Entrepreneurship Fund
We had an idea of a monthly one hundred thousand naira fund targeted towards entrepreneurs on Fidia to run and grow their businesses. Simply put, businesses that made the most sales or had the most transactions on Fidia would be eligible for one hundred thousand naira.
The criteria to win were to create their business website with Fidia, add their business website to their social media channels, receive payments, or make sales of at least one hundred and fifty thousand naira monthly. We later scraped the idea to do something else.
Product Pages 2.0
On November 10, 2022, we rolled out an update to Product Pages that allows anyone to sell different categories of products with Fidia.
Discount Codes
On November 21, 2022, we launched discount codes—an easy way to generate discount codes for customers buying your products through Fidia Product Pages.
Fidia 3.0
In January 2023, we rolled out Fidia 3.0 to position Fidia as a website builder due to the reactions we got with the feature, so it became our main product.
Whogohost
In February 2023, we signed an agreement with Whogohost to assist us with marketing in exchange for equity to reach a target number of users by July 2023. We got a lot of users through broadcast emails they sent to their users, banners, and backlinks they added to their landing page header and footer. We also got some cash to test different marketing channels and ended up with Google Ads. Unfortunately, both companies didn’t meet the targeted milestone, and the agreement became void.
Website Templates
We rolled out templates, which served as a starting point and made it easy to build a website quickly on Fidia. We added a feature flag to template publishing, and it was only turned on for employees internally to create templates for other users on Fidia. Most of the templates were built by us, and it was fantastic to see so many people using them.
Spam and Bots
We noticed a massive influx of spam accounts and bots creating websites for pirated movies from Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. These accounts caused a spike in the number of websites built on Fidia and increased website views and clicks, which impacted our server costs.
We temporarily fixed the issue by identifying and restricting the IP addresses of those accounts and blocking their access to create more websites.
I later discovered an article written by the cofounder of Jemi about the process of how they fought spam at Jemi; he explained how issues like these were common with website builders and ways to prevent them by blocking disposable emails, rate-limiting account creation from a single IP address, and adding Google reCAPTCHA and Honeypot captcha to the signup page.
AI Assitant
OpenAI started getting popular, and we wanted to make it easier for anyone who needed a website to get one with less effort. The idea was that you could create a one-page website for your brand or business by describing what you wanted, and the AI would generate the relevant site sections with content in 60 seconds.
The first version I designed was a chat-based UI. After numerous iterations internally, we switched it into a process where you could describe the type of website you want and what you want to be included. It will generate a website that can be claimed, published, and added to your dashboard.
We encountered issues with the time taken to generate an entire website. We resolved them by implementing Server-Sent Events (SSE) and adding multiple loading state messages to show the status and progress of the site generation.
Expert Program
We introduced an expert program where freelancers on Fidia can build websites for other businesses. Part of the program was an application fee of five thousand naira with two weeks of training that covered a range of essential topics, including introductory graphics, mastering Fidia’s features, designing portfolio websites, creating online stores, managing clients, and sourcing clients independently. Seeing them pay for the program and join the training sessions was fascinating.
Google Ads
We tried Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn ads, but Google Ads worked for us; we got over 100+ weekly users through that channel.
Fidia Pro
We introduced a pricing plan and limited some features on the free plan. We got some paying customers, but we were too late, and it wasn’t enough.
Teams
On August 29, 2023, we rolled out Teams, which allows users on Fidia to invite and collaborate with other users as editors or viewers.
Enterprise: Norebase
We had an enterprise plan at Fidia to provide grey/white labelling of the website builder to any businesses that needed it.
Our product manager, David Ijaola, connected us with the product and engineering team at Norebase; they wanted a solution to allow users who registered their businesses to be able to buy a domain and automatically connect it to a website built on Fidia, which they could access through the dashboard link and could choose to publish the website.
Nothing came out of it as we spent a lot of time in meetings to understand the core of what they wanted, and at the same time, we were building a new version of Fidia entirely from scratch—Fidia 4.0.
Enterprise: Airtel
An investor connected us to one of the leaders at Airtel. The goal was to build a white-labelled version of the Fidia website builder where Airtel customers could easily create a website for their businesses. Those customers could log in to the platform with their Airtel number, receive OTP confirmation to continue, and use AI or templates as a starting point to create any website they wanted.
Nothing came out of this; it was closer to when we had to wind down operations, and there was no point in pursuing it.
Muzu
We got a deal to take over Muzu with a loan in exchange for a large amount of equity, which would be repaid when it became profitable.
The plan was to merge Muzu with Fidia whenever we completed Fidia 4.0. At first, we rejected the deal, but after a couple of weeks of evaluating our options to save Fidia, we eventually said yes, but the deal fell through anyway.
Fidia 4.0
We wanted to build something users could pay top dollar for and started thinking of ways to achieve that. I took the lead on crafting the documentation of what v4.0 could look like, analyzing user feedback in our experts' program, and ending up with a more advanced and customizable Fidia that could build any website the users wanted.
I brought in a contract interface designer to work with me as I didn’t want to get in the way of pushing the boundaries of what could be done, and it turned out to be a good idea. The project cost was six figures, but it was worth it.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t release it as it was still undergoing development when we had to wind down operations. The money could have been used for something else, but the contract was initiated when we still had a clearer view of surviving. I didn’t regret making that decision because we could spin off the product and build it as a new, separate product.
Cause of Death
We weren’t able to raise additional funding during ODX demo days. First, everyone who was part of the accelerator based in Africa agreed that we needed a partner with knowledge of the African markets and investment landscape. After several months, we eventually got one, and some weeks later, OnDeck had funding issues internally and had to let most of the partners go. We lost the leading partner assigned to us and the African partner assigned to all startups.
Secondly, we struggled with positioning and traction, which we fixed in Fidia 3.0 in January 2023 and our partnership with Whogohost in February 2023.
In November 2022, we had to let three of our employees go. I sent out a company-wide message stating that in 2023, we would focus on being sustainable and profitable as our cash in the bank started to dry up with some months of runway left. Still, we connected with an investor in January 2023 and quickly changed the focus to growth, which was part of our major mistake by relying solely on them and thinking they could save us.
After the six-month relationship of talking and building together, we thought something would come from that, but when it was time to wire funds to save the company, we were left with no options but to shut down the company. I realised that it’s nothing personal, just business.
In August 2023, we spoke with a leader in the OnDeck team after months of convincing us to shut down the company. In September 2023, we finally took the advice to shut down the company and its products after months of finding alternative ways to keep the company alive.
We communicated the unfortunate news of Fidia’s closure to our employees, and I’m grateful that they were able to understand how and why it happened because we tried as much as possible to keep everyone on the team informed about the status and position of Fidia throughout 2023.
We also sent out notice of discontinuation to our users, refunded some users, and paid out the balances left in some users' wallets directly into their bank accounts.
Looking back, it is sad to watch the company go down, but fulfilling to see how much the product we built evolved. What used to be MemberPay was built as a little side project and then turned into an early-stage startup. Many lessons were learned from the whole experience, and I will try as much as possible not to repeat the same mistakes I made while building Fidia again if I ever try to build new products.
It was an exciting journey that wouldn’t have been possible without all of you—our users, investors, and employees: Victor Sanusi, Abdullahi Odesanmi, Babatunde Koiki, David Ijaola, Marvis Chukwudi, Nosakhare Ogbemudia, Nwosu Oluebube, Olaniyi Ojeyinka, Oluwatosin Olutoge, Evangel Chidera, Omolara Sanni, Sodiq Agunbiade, and Onibudo Oluwaseyi.
Thank you for supporting us from the beginning until the end.
It wouldn’t be a complete story without appreciating how special my two cofounders, Gbadebo Bello and Ajibola Akelebe, are. None of this would exist without having them by my side and being the most brilliant, hard-working, selfless, and great partners you could ever ask for.
As I reflect on some of the things I have worked on in the past, I don’t believe I have any regrets, but one thing that echoes in my mind is whether it was all worth it. Honestly, I don’t know; I’m still trying to figure that out, but I’m grateful for all the experiences and the journey I’ve had so far.
Spinoff
We’re building something new, different, more advanced, and better than Fidia under a new name, part-time, as a side project. We’ve taken all the feedback, learnings, and failures from Fidia and used them to refine the new idea. We may or may not release it, but if we do, it’ll be a global paid product from day one, offering a 14-day free trial.
What we’re building is fundamentally hard to do, depending on the approach you take, and thankfully, we’re a small team of six guys who can get things done no matter how challenging they are. It will not be easy for anyone to wake up and decide that they want to copy it, as it requires patience, extensive design, product, and engineering thinking to get it right.
When we started working on the new idea, we noticed that only one startup in this region was pursuing it, but it’s a ripe and mature market globally. Our aim now is to build something good, attract customers, and charge them to use the platform.
Considering our limited funds, we plan to maintain a low profile and costs to ensure we don’t set expectations too high. We’re not striving to dominate any market or pursue unrealistic growth. Instead, our approach will be calm, fun, and perhaps uneventful, yet it should sustain itself to avoid future shutdowns. The era of racing to the bottom and building stuff for free is over; it’s time for us to offer something both valuable and affordable.
There are internal discussions about bringing in potential investors who would want to be part of it. We’re not actively raising money now, but investors are always welcomed only if they align with our mission, have patient capital, seek dividends from future revenue using the SEAL/Indie/other financing structure, or want lifetime access to the new platform.
