Chasing Dreams, Battling Nightmares: A Fight Against Principalities.
The relentless pursuit of happiness is abruptly the quickest way to depression. However, I am not the type to dwell in the fantasies of hedonism. I am as pessimistic as they come, with a good amount of optimism to balance things out; that way, nothing ever surprises me. Despite being this prepared mentally, the outcome of the tireless efforts we put in knocked me out completely. Although it wasn’t all bleak, there were times we had dopamine overflowing our cups, which felt good — but those moments were short-lived.
The absolute rush of adrenaline — Copnow was going live in 48 hours. The true happiness of engineers isn’t just about building; it’s the delight of having other folks use what you’ve crafted. Wisdom and Chuks gave a green light on their end. Jake and I had just fully tested with over 80 cases, being assertive. I vividly remember the night we promoted our API to production — spent over 2 hours on a call with Jake debugging issues with Apache, SSH securities, and AWS Route53 errors from the pit of hell. Let me not bore you with this; I will probably write an article much later on it.
We are live and have active users, still piloting, not doing much. During this period, we were just doing things organically — no ads, no active campaigns. However, we decided to hire a marketing lead; the season of love was upon us, and it was only right to have a campaign to celebrate the love birds. David, Wisdom, and I conducted interviews for the first time. It veritably felt surreal because just a year ago, we were all pasting our resumes everywhere. Anyway, we found the perfect candidate, Kazeem, and onboarded him.
Kazeem is literally the guy you’d hypothetically call at night and tell him, “Hey, I want to take on a fight with Meta, cook up a marketing plan for this,” and he’d simply say, “This is very possible; give me 3 days.” I worked very closely with Kazeem; he is a very optimistic and reliable individual full of ideas. He literally owned the role of a marketing lead, curating top-notch proposals, quarterly goals, and objectives. As the tasks became too hectic for him, we hired an assistant, Eunice, to handle the digital parts of marketing. Eunice is nothing short of amazing; she personally grew our SEO presence astronomically. We executed our little campaign for the amorous duo and got the traction we needed.
Post-launch, Q2, we went live fully. Things went so well, with a lot of activities and not one dull moment. There was always exhilaration attending standups; Kazeem always had something exciting to share. Traction was growing, and we didn’t bother much about revenue because we knew it would come with time. We met with the Head of Sales for Nike in Nigeria, Adidas distributors, Shein wholesalers, and so much more. It was a good time; everything was going as planned. We conducted offline marketing, got a considerable number of businesses onboard, and hit over 1000 active users. We felt unstoppable — but we overlooked a glaring issue: ‘No revenue.’ We were mentally prepared for it, realistically understanding the challenges of convincing anyone to buy something online.
Things took a refutable turn when we realized we were almost out of funds, and no revenue had been recorded so far to sustain the company’s operations. Our marketing strategy changed to focus on getting users to shop, but we got nothing. Different trials, money spent, and no metrics were obtained. How difficult would it be to convince Nigerians? Running out of funds, tension everywhere, sleepless nights thinking of what to do. We made a dire mistake and spent an insurmountable amount of money on a strategy that gave us zero ROI. This wasn’t Kazeem’s fault; it was our fault as managers. We could’ve done better in our decisions. Situations worsened, and we slowed down on our marketing because we were almost out of funds. Kazeem came up with ideal approaches, but we couldn’t afford to fund these endeavors. It got so bad that we had to drop some of our services.
Almost obliterated, this wasn’t how we imagined things would get. I knew it would be difficult, but not this awful. Seeing our SEO drastically fall, everything slowly getting wiped out. We tried one last approach. This last campaign gave us hope; we got a lot of inquiries. We still didn’t make any sales because the businesses on our product didn’t have enough variations for customers. At least we knew we did something right, and it was the perfect track to follow. Did we do more? No! Why? We were out of funding, and we had to downsize. It was the most difficult time ever, having to be the leader who says, ‘Hey, we can’t afford to pay again, hence we’d be dropping you.’ It felt horrible. How did we do so well to end up this way?
We had the perfect team, from Kazeem leading the marketing, Eunice making things work digitally to Mfon, our ever-reliable mobile engineer, Ese, and Hoffman, our brand designers. They were all dropped. I will personally vouch for all of them; they’re the true heroes of Copnow. Promised to reach out immediately we get more funding.
Well, we have the perfect ideas and the perfect product; getting funding would be easy, or so we thought. I have rigorously applied to over 20 VCs so far and reached out to so many tech founders. None replied; the ones that replied blatantly refused to meet. The VCs that got back said some fancy words about why they’d not be accepting Copnow. I mean, it’s okay to just blatantly refuse like the founders; no need to make it fancy. It almost feels like I am just starting out in tech, looking for internship positions. No one ever replies, no one has accepted to speak for us; sometimes, I begin to doubt myself and my thoughts. Oh yeah, one VC got back and set up a meeting; the meeting was an absolute disaster — can’t explain why. They said they’d revert after the meeting; it’s been three weeks now, and we have not heard anything.
2023 is trying so hard to be 2021. I’ve never felt this way; I can’t even trust my decisions anymore. I have slightly started to doubt Copnow’s vision, or maybe I have been delusional all along. I feel so livid, and I really want to shout so bad and yell at someone. It’s been a horrible year, but I’m hanging in there, fighting principalities and my demons, never to give up. We had just recently applied to Techstars — fingers crossed; hopefully, things get better.
Cheers.
