I Slaved My Way Into Becoming A Tech Expert Within 1 Year Of Earning A Tech Degree

"A dream does not become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination, and hard work." --Collin Powell

Have you read the first part of this story ? if you haven't , here it is click to read , you need to read it so that you can get a full picture of the total journey.

Here goes the second part of my story :?

Fast forward to graduation and going for the mandatory 1 year corps service as required by my country of every graduate, I built my first solo active web application - a database management system for the Institute of African Studies University of Ibadan, to manage their vast information and heritage documents. This was a very fulfilling experience for me.

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My First Job as a graduate was with a technology firm as a programmer using ASP.net (a derivative of the Visual basic i had self taught myself in school). Few months into my new job, the company started developing an ecommerce website , one of the first of its kind in my country Nigeria as at then , it was in 2008 , way before ecommerce became a thing in the country.?

My intense love and calling for Ecommerce development and marketing started right here as I watched my boss delve into a very new industry in an unstable economy. I fell in love .?

While I do my job as a programmer and worked as part of the team that created the first thriving? ecommerce platform in Nigeria - taafoo.com , I would also watch as marketing strategies were created by the marketing department and take note, I also started shadowing my boss and I would learn as he started creating Facebook Ads and google ads to market the business - this was in 2008.?

My Boss was a very hardworking man that places the same expectation on his employees, even though It was my first year in the labour market , I was given a lot of responsibilities and I had to deliver, I literarily had no life as I had to work very late every day plus weekends to meetup with expectations.

I left the company after 1 year but not after I had soaked up so much knowledge . God bless bosses who are not stingy with their knowledge. I was like a sea receiving water into it, as I got more water I became more thirsty, I WAS EXCITED, I WAS ELATED , I felt as if I had found my calling.

I moved onto another company and was also an ad hoc staff with the Women In Technology in Nigeria for a few months before I stopped working due to an auto accident that left me hospitalized for a few weeks.?

My Friend , lanre Moluga , classmates from school and very close friend now, told me about a business plan competition happening at his church organized by Tonye Cole, Bunmi Oni and Friends. I applied for the competition, got shortlisted, created my business plan and was one of the few people who won and the only lady with a solo company .

My Idea was to start a multi vendor platform , this was in 2010 , internet access had not become an household commodity, there was no smartphone and business owners(in this case market people) had limited access to the internet, but Mayowa had big dreams and I was eager to put everything I had been learning plus my big ideas into motion.

I created the first multi vendor ecommerce website in Nigeria, single handedly coded it using ASP.net. I went into Yaba market and recruited vendors in different categories, the popular Alhaja stores in Yaba was my cosmetics vendor. I also had a big book store sign up.

At this stage, I also became a photographer. With my little brother's help I had created a photo box and I would go to my vendors' shops and take pictures of their products and upload them on my multi vendor ecommerce platform.

I launched, started running ads and generating traffic to the website and started selling …. Yayyyy … I got orders from all over Nigeria and the first few weeks were good and then the beginning of the end started.?

The business was doing quite well in the space of a few months, alas the idea I had and the technology I built was a few years faster/earlier than what the available infrastructure could handle.?

I couldn't reconcile the stock level on the platform with my customers' real time inventory.?

When orders were made on the site,? I had to manually inform the vendor, pick it up and ship. Over 70% of orders are being refunded because by the time they are in , my vendor is already out of stock on the same item.?

Communication at that time was over GSM phones , there was no easy access to the internet as we have now.?

Needless to say, there was no feasible solution to this problem, and so I had to close down this thriving business, who would think that “selling very well” could actually be the death of a business.?

This was a great learning curve for me and I will share some of the lessons I have learnt in this journey with you.?

In the meantime, know that it is only Part 1 of my journey into Digital Tech and Marketing, as after this short entrepreneurial stint I would go on and start a new journey into IT project management where I managed and deployed applications worth billions of naira for the financial institutions and the lessons learnt are MEGA.

Watch out for the second leg of my journey into the Digital Tech + Marketing Industries.?

My Take Home from the story above and the advice i would give a young person (im partial towards the girls)

1. Follow your heart - most times it will lead you right - despite what people around you “think you should be”
2. Be hardworking - There's no shortcut, you will work smart but you will also work hard?
3. Be willing to explore - explore all your interests , no knowledge is ever wasted
4. Be consistent - even in the face of challenges - you will always come out on the better side
5. Every Failure is actually a Win, it is only a stepping stone to a higher level, never see failure as the end of anything.

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