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What I learned Cargo-culting eBay and Google - Product development

zooboole

Published By zooboole

Back in 2006, right after building my first e-commerce(restez-jeune.com) website for my first customer, I felt ready to be ambitious. I thought I would bring the eBay shopping experience to my African counterparts.

Notepad was the only code editor I knew then. I was just about 4 years learning PHP, CSS, and Javascript. I had no source of income, even from my parents. People around me did not even know what a website was, less coding.

I took the project very seriously. I started dreaming(planning). I would go to school, but I would be interested in courses that could bring me some information or resources that could help me, and that was no such thing of course. I used libraries(specifically, CCF) to read more about programming.

I remained in planning and try-and-fails for 2 years. In 2008, I was finally ready to make the thing go real. I used some saved money to buy my domain name oyakoo.com. Can you feel some Goooooogling in there? lol

I found a French web hosting service called LWS and decided to take the risk to buy my domain name and a hosting package. It cost me about 58,000 FCFA then. And I had to send the money through Western Union and wait for about 2 weeks. During that waiting time, many people around me told me that I was scammed. I was so scared that I would never hear from LWS again. Thanks to the sincerity and strictness of the white man, they replied to me and confirmed my order.

I had a domain name and the hosting ready to host my business online. After a few corrections to my code, I finally pushed oyakoo.com online. What followed then was a whole story on its own.

I got some orders from France, Tunisia, Gabon, etc. I was using DHL to deliver. Sometimes the shipping would cost like 2 times the product price, but people would still order. But my obsession was to reach eBay's standard. I designed the logo to look like eBay's logo then with a mix of lower and upper characters, all close to each other. Then I played with the "oo" sound from Google to meet the trend then. I kept on doing this more many years to follow. Let's leave the history part and look at some of the lessons learned:

  1. I ignored the business aspect of it and focused more on the technology. This is the biggest mistake I made in the whole story. As soon as I had that MVP, I could have just focused on the business. I have always felt that I needed to get the site at a certain level before I could do business. It's a wrong approach.

  2. I had a business idea that was right in time but I failed to identify that

  3. I had the risk-taking mentality already

  4. I was far ahead of my time as a child in secondary school in an environment where people did not know about technology

  5. Honest and sincere e-commerce always works. People are ready if you prove to them that you are serious. So many scammers invaded this business in the following years

  6. People around me never believed in me, nor my product, nor ever ordered anything. Always have that in mind and never use it to determine if your product works or not.

  7. Jumia might haven't existed

  8. I could not reach eBay's standard because I was a one-man team and eBay is a giant. Sometimes they release a new design before I could even copy a button. And since I could not see the old design, I could not continue and had to start over. These are things people need to know. Sometimes I get clients who would ask me to create a website like so so website. Most websites are backed by teams of experienced people. It's not easy to replicate, and you will not necessarily be able to copy their business strategy or make any revenue.

Fast forward to today

In 2020, a friend from Konnect Liberia asked me if I could make a copy of oyakoo.com for a client he found so that we can get them an e-commerce website quickly. I agreed, but I had to host it and maintain the server for them to protect my code. I did, but eventually, the client was not serious. Then I went to propose the same thing to two friends who had shops and they agreed. I would create a sub-domain for them and then copy the code. I had to make the same configuration over and over. I realized that I could make it a shared code and allow people to create and configure the store for themselves. Because. I was getting worried that many people ask me to do the same for them. Then I stopped copying and rather set off to build it as SaaS when people create their stores.

Unfortunately, I could not code it then because I went through some calamity and lost my son and got seriously ill until 2022.

By October 2022, while I was still under treatment I decided to start working on that code. In December, I launched a new product called OYakoo Stores

While I was researching this technology, I met Shopify. oh my God! these people are doing what I am looking for. Sincerely, I would have given up if I had met Shopify before starting. But since I am already in and I have a fair idea of how the infrastructure work, then I continued.

I realize today there are people out there who need the product. So, I am growing it for them.

As a software developer, I have learned so much through this experience. trying to build eBay several times thought me a lot about coding some features and most importantly about e-commerce. Today, I am getting interested in SaaS products and I am realizing how building and maintaining websites is a good starting point to become an entrepreneur and product developer. And I will continue to share my journey with OYakoo Stores with you. Sign up to the newsletter for updates. I usually don't send them but, I might from time to time.