When you get the idea, you are excited, thrilled and sometimes anxious….

You wake up in the early hours of the morning thinking about it….

It consumes you like a passionate lover….

It becomes the major thing you think about, breath on and talk about…

It takes your time and energy and you spend so many days and nights trying to figure out how to put it together and make it work….

I thought my business vocabulary was full and well cultivated after business school and that there could be no new words to daunt me after two years of learning about business plans, case studies and blue prints….

However over a decade later, I Co-founded Owoafara (a financial technology startup helping under-served micro and small businesses in Nigeria get access to financing and support).

Once I entered the startup world, I was confronted by new terms like Pitch deck (Business plans seem archaic in startup world), CAP table and TAM (total addressable market). Just as I was settling in on those terms, I was confronted with a new term; “Path to Profitability”.

A wonderful mentor who is a later stage investor told me that having an innovative idea was not enough in the Covid era; Startups needed to show they were building a sustainable business with a clear Path to Profitability.

Here I was working closely with members of our founding team to figure out PMF (means product market fit, another elaborate and very important term in startup world) and I was confronted with the reality that PMF was not enough, it had to come at a reasonable CAC (customer acquisition cost) and show that we could make money and sustain the business sooner than later!

All these reminds me of a complex puzzle. You spend hours, sometimes days trying to figure out where all the parts fit in. Sometimes you are frustrated and you want to give up and throw in the towel. Other times, you are excited because you finally figure out where one tiny piece fits in. That tiny piece is just enough motivation to keep going with the hope that you will figure out where the other pieces fit in.

On some days you wonder if there could be a better use of your time than figuring out “pieces of this puzzle” without the assurance of a big reward for all your effort. But your curiosity gets the better of you. You tell yourself the real reward is the gratification of seeing the puzzles fully assembled. You assure yourself that the deep satisfaction it would give you is priceless and almost like an addictive habit, you keep going…no matter how long it takes.

That has been my startup journey so far, and I have been at it for almost two years sounds better?

I wonder what I will be saying six months or one year from now….