Ship & Build Early — for tech startups
Missing out on a billion-dollar market!
Think it — Do it: In the game of startups, execution counts. A true story.
Sometime in 2014, I aspired to undertake a film recording project in my early startup, driven by my passion for cinematography. I assembled a team and sent official emails about this new project that enthused me.
As preparations unfolded, I realised that due to the geographical dispersion of team members, we needed an official platform for communication, collaboration, and report sharing — a kind of e-office where team members could work officially without being physically present. This need arose while gearing up for the film project.
I created a Facebook closed group, which was the primary communication channel at that time. However, I wasn’t satisfied; we needed a better tool. Along the way, I reconnected with an old developer from the University and shared the idea with him, though he was engrossed in another project/startup.
Back then, I had just started learning HTML & CSS with guidance from two developer friends. My skills weren’t advanced enough to build that product, so I approached another software developer I had met during a Google map maker programme in my final year at Uni. We collaborated, and the new tool was named e-ffix.
During my research, I discovered a product called Yammer, which Microsoft acquired in 2012 for $1.2 Billion. I was confident our product, e-ffix, would be different from Yammer. Despite some people thinking I was crazy to attempt building e-ffix, I believed I had identified a problem that needed a solution.
Fast forward, we were unable to launch and ship that product in 2014. However, my conviction that there was a product-market fit for our idea was validated. I later learned about Slack, which wasn’t widely known in our area back then. Slack was eventually sold for $27.7 Billion to Salesforce in 2021.
Today, I am a more experienced founder. You never know; if you have a product in mind, launch it quickly if you’re confident it solves a problem. My developer friend now works with Stripe 😊
Find a problem and solve it in the most minute way possible, irrespective of funding. Shout out to my brother and long-time pal through my startup journey who can relate 😃 to this. Those long nights.
Today, I am building another startup at Reispar Technologies, and we’re pivoting from a product in anomaly detection into something else. Watch out :)
Support my work!
I shared my experiences on Twitter then— https://twitter.com/Tolulade_ato/status/1451164408588210180
Subscribe to my newsletter on Substack!
