It took two and a chance

Year 2021, I had just returned from Guinea. Don’t ask me what for! It was just a few months after a contract I had been working on for about a year just ended. I had to move on to something else.

I had a gripe with the shopping experience in Accra. I hated to give directions to my place all the time; because it wasn’t easy to do so. Another issue, among many others, was chatting with online sellers. It was just a painful experience — it would seem like a bother when enquiring for details. But it doesn’t have to be so!

So I felt both online sellers (I’ll call them merchants henceforth) and customers could benefit from a system of online checkout. Using text messaging as a means to sell/buy isn’t optimal — especially for growing business that have to handle tens of orders in a day.

So I begun to work on Adeton. Adeton’s goal was simple: help merchants build websites for themselves without technical knowledge and allow their customers to be able to place orders from their new site. This endeavor took me about 4 months to complete.

Octopus

On this project, I was the designer, developer and devops. I promise you, I don’t think I was bad at any of those roles. Having given people chances before, I have always felt I was quicker by myself. But that’s only when I’m working.

In this four months period, I had a constant battle with motivation and loneliness. I found myself having to deal with a lot of problems all by myself. But that is natural — that is the tradeoff of wanting to go fast.

Now product is launched.

I had to carry the responsibility of customer service, advertisement, financing, etc. These aspects don’t really need speed though. But I tried! I tried to get someone else to help with customer service — that was the first time I had to hire someone 🤣. And that few weeks of managing this person was beneath my expectation. It was poor!

So I rescinded to working on my own.

A few months later I got a fulltime remote job to support my finances. But as time went on, my attention begun to dwindle away from Adeton. Already, after spending so much on advertisement, I wasn’t really getting an encouraging turnover. This demanded restrategizing. This demanded reorganization. But then again, it’s just me. Having a well paying job, I couldn’t find the reason and motivation to keep investing enough time on Adeton all by myself.

So I kept a soft grip on it.

Recruit 1

After two years, I met Perry, who would later turned out to be my partner. He reached out in regards of a delivery fullfilment partnership. But I was already demotivated about Adeton so I kept stalling him. Mind you, Adeton had processed about 100k cedis in orders by this time. But Perry, kept tabs. He kept pressing on and on about Adeton.

Some time in 2023, Paystack withdrew my access to their API immediately because I didn’t perform KYC on my customers. This demanded I switch payment processors. Perry was very pivotal in helping get one. He conducted the meetings with providers and ultimately got me a replacement.

On the other hand, I was just hoping this would be the moment to completely abandon Adeton.

This was the turning point. The moment I begun to appreciate collaboration.

Ex

Before Perry, someone reached out to me offering to help with the business operations side of things. In fact, I preemptively offered a huge stake as a motivator. This person did almost nothing towards the growth of Adeton.

You can understand my pessimism.

Aart

Last year, 2024, I built compa. This project was meant to be an initiative to improve the tertiary education experience when it came to resources. Arthur, from University of Ghana, found interest in it and started contributing to the project too. He expressed a lot of passion for the project and its success. And also ever ready to learn.

Later in the year, I had a side project and asked him to help me on it. During this time, his contribution did require a lot of attention — we had a lot of back and forths about how some implementations were done. But I thought he was promising.

When I begun the refresh of Adeton, I invited him to contribute. And he agreed. This was early May. By the end of June, we were around 90% completion per our target. During this period, Arthur’s contributions were phenomenal. The quality of code and user experience were top. He begun to explore some developer experience improvements too. It was beautiful to watch.

I could entrust a lot of things to him with little supervision.

And voila, we actually took less time than I did years ago. 2 months!

Thanks

This is mostly an appreciation post for Perry and Arthur but also a lesson on collaboration. Maybe if I had given it a chance earlier, I would gone farther. But I’m lucky to be part of this team.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go farther, go together.