How a wedding wish led to our startup idea

Part 1: MVP

In the weeks leading up to my wedding in 2020, friends and family kept asking my wife and I what they could help us with as we prepared to move into a new home together.

My wife and I researched several wish list platforms but none gave us the flexibility we needed.

1. Flexibility to add any item
   We wanted to be able to add items without being limited to certain merchants
2. Flexibility to chip in any amount
   We also wanted to give our loved ones the option to make part or full cash contributions towards any item on our wishlist

In case you’re wondering, Brother Bachelor in the screenshot is Tolu Adesina. That’s the name his mum instructed me to start calling him for obvious reasons. My prayers are with him!

Back to the story, that weekend was epic. Jo Bobo and I worked on the MVP interface and experience, my wife (our only user at the time) provided insight on how she would want the app to work and our small nimble engineering team led by Tega put it all together.

Presenting to you, unboxd 1.0!

• The Ui needed a lot of rework but the goal at the time wasn’t to have a perfect product but instead, a functional MVP that we could use immediately. My wedding was only a few days away.
• Items were manually uploaded from backend as there wasn’t enough time to build out the sign up and create a wishlist flow.

The app worked, we created our wedding wishlist, shared it with loved ones and they really came through. We did a quick payment integration that helped our loved ones home and abroad to contribute for items we wished for.

Part 2: Scaling up

After the wedding, we didn’t do much with the app anymore. A couple of months after, many of our loved ones who used the platform to contribute to our wishlist asked if they could use it for their own Birthdays, Weddings, Anniversary and even Charity causes. The requests were mounting and so, we got back to it and decided to build it out for other people to use.

Now, we had time to go over the Ui and the entire app experience. We redesigned the interface and added the ability to sign up and set up your own wishlist.

Anyone in Nigeria can now use unboxd to

• Create a wish list with pictures and price for your item
• Generate a link to share it with your loved ones
• Receive part or full cash contributions in a secure wallet
• Request payout to any local bank account in Nigeria

We launched to very good reviews on ProductHunt, check it out here

And… the wedding was lit too.

Building a startup is a long journey and right now, we are taking our baby steps. We are currently improving the product daily and trying to get to our first 5,000 users. If you have a birthday, wedding, anniversary or any type of occasion coming up, please use unboxd to create your wishlist and collect cash contributions from your loved ones.

A short backstory:
Every 90s and 80s kid in Nigeria used Promise Cards. They were multi-coloured printed cards with rows and columns that helped kids organise their Christmas and New Year wishes.

In less than 6hrs, we worked on a digital version sometime in 2019 just for fun. Looking back now, promisecard.com.ng was our first step into building a gifting app but we just didn’t know it yet.