Founding & making it to the starting line.
I’ve always viewed Founding as (the start of) an existential crisis of sorts, which is funny because its supposed to signify the point where you just begin to exist, so how can you already have a crisis? how is it even possible that something is already threatening your existence? Well that’s the funny part — that the crisis is that you might never even begin to exist as a startup; after 7 months of eating noodles everyday, writing a thousand and one lines of code, shipping an MVP and getting feedback from users, the crisis might just be over — and your dream with it, you’d have failed to begin to exist, you were unable to make it to the starting line (;- ) funny eh?)…it all ended somewhere between -1 and 0.
As delicate as Founding is, there is no template for the ‘right’ or ‘ideal’ team, its different for every startup and I don’t think there is a one-rule-fits-all method for picking the right folks; what I do know is that get things wrong at that point and you have made your already slim chances of succeeding even slimmer by adding ‘Bad founding’ team to the list of things that could potentially lead to your undoing — plus if you are starting a startup in Nigeria, that list is pretty long…from ‘catering to a low income population’ and ‘expensive distribution channels’ to ‘missing product market fit’ and ‘bad timing’, that list is long; so the idea is to not add another potential obstacle to the list and do everything you can to get things right for your own unique case.
Since I started dabbling in Tech Startups about 5 years ago I’ve always been fortunate (or blessed if you will) to have great folks as co-founders — I often look back at the founding team of my first startup and although things didn’t quite go the way we hoped, one thing is clear to me now (hindsight is always 20/20), that we were a great team — rock-stars in our own right; yes we had a lot to learn (about the uniqueness of Tech markets in developing countries like Nigeria), we started (boldly) straight out of university and decided to ‘go for it’ and we had heated arguments and tough periods like any other team of (reasonably) smart people, but no one could question our passion, drive, and ability to pick up skills super fast — and I’d always remember how different people would ask me…”How did you put together such an amazing team?”.
Well the answer is that it wasn’t all planned and I didn’t ‘pick the team’ per se — it just happened that we all had entrepreneurial inclinations, we all had known each other from our time in university to a good extent and we were willing to try an idea we felt could work.
Fast forward a few years to April this year, and I got asked the same question at the beta-launch for TwoCents https://www.twocents.space … ”How did you get such a great team?”. The truth is that I like to think that it was fate that brought us together and that’s where this story really begins. About a year ago we (I and the guys at LLH, my previous startup) were looking to run an awareness campaign for our EdTech product targeted at high school students and we decided to visit the teens sections of various churches close to where I live. At this particular church I asked for the ‘person in charge’ of the teens and I was told he wasn’t around at the time(incidentally we were in the same place 2 days ago) — when I finally got to meet and I spoke with him, I knew he was an up-and-doing person but little did I know that a few months later we would be starting something together.
Tobi and Tunde had started an ‘infopreneurial’ and capacity-building forum called Breaking Frontiers where they helped young folks harness their potential and hone their various skill sets by providing them with mentors and resources in their fields of interest/endeavor. They had done some really interesting and impressive work with Breaking Frontiers which they hosted on a Whatsapp group for over a year…and by the time we had a few discussions about what they had been up to and what I was currently working on, we began to see the opportunity for us to work together and create something bigger, better and more scalable. We (3 of us) were clearly passionate about creating platforms to help young people develop themselves, get mentorship and advice, and meet like-minded folks with similar interests and realities; so on one faithful evening in July last year, I asked Tobi if he want’s to ‘do this’…to go all in and the rest is history.
By that time I had already started slapping together some code for TwoCents though the idea was still all over the place and I wasn’t entirely sure about what core product value would be and the right product strategy to implement; having them onboard helped to solve this — it became clearer and clearer after several ideation sessions what needed to go and what needed to stay, the product became more focused and months later we had an MVP we could ship. It all happened so fast that sometimes I feel like it was all a very long and interesting dream — I thank God whenever I think of how I met the founders of Breaking Frontiers because its really difficult to find like-minded, passionate folks who just happen to share the same ideas as you and are also trustworthy.
When that guy asked me the question at the beta-launch of TwoCents in April, I rapidly played back the story I just told in my head and I smiled and said…”Honestly I don’t know how it all happened, I’m just grateful to God” and that’s the truth. Its really difficult to find the ‘right’ people (for your unique case) to work with and many a startup have died quickly because of internal fighting or some misalignment between founders — and its really difficult to fix things down the road when there is a problem with/between the founding team (Thiel’s Law ;-))
So far so good, and although the team is smaller than when we started, things have been good and we are hoping they get even better — we are closer to the starting line and on the whole I’m convinced that our team is a great one and although we are still figuring out a lot, one thing that is clear is that we are a group of people who genuinely care about seeing our vision come to fruition and we won’t stop till we get there.
Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t joined TwoCents, we would love to have you in the community and we look forward to your insights, questions and answers.
Tschuss!
