03 The startup corner
03

The startup corner

Building a project ends when it works. Building a company starts there.

I do not only build projects. Somewhere between the hackathons and the contracts, the interesting question stopped being can this be built and became is this worth building, for whom, and who is going to hear about it. That question is what this corner is for.

featured — the one that is a company

Cardra

A card problem that started as a personal grudge.

Cardra is a startup helping make crypto more usable for the Nigerian market. It lets people spend crypto through virtual cards and move between crypto and fiat without the usual friction.

stage
Pre-seed · in incubation
market
Nigeria first
my role
Co-founder

permanent

THE DAILY DRIVER

temporary

EXPIRES

BURN AFTER CHECKOUT

The loop

Nobody draws this part on a pitch deck. It is most of the work.

IDEAPROTOTYPEUSERSBUILDITERATECHAOSREPEATTHE LOOP01/7

Note that the loop has no exit node. That is not an oversight.

what a co-founder actually does all week

build
Contracts, frontend, services. The product has to exist before anything else is true.
product
Deciding what the thing is, and — harder — what it refuses to be.
users
Getting real Nigerians using it and listening to what they actually say.
content
Distribution is not a growth hack bolted on later. It is a channel I already know how to run.
growth
Turning attention into people who come back on Thursday.

The engineering degree turned out to be useful here, and not for the maths. It taught me to design for the failure case first.