I thought thrice, and I am still thinking about what I am about to do right now whilst I type this. I am about to tell, the never told Nairahost story, but its something a lot of African start-ups can learn from. I do hope I don’t end up making my partners very unhappy about what I am about to do.

This would be a series, a story about an African start-up that began with only $100 dollars in capital, without financial backing, without access to possible loans, that grew from 2 customers to more than 3,000++ paying customers, without marketing and hosted about 8,000 domains across many servers at a data-centre in the US.

This would reveal mistakes we made, such as undercharging for our services, how we burnt through cash through strategies we introduced without an indepth analysis on what we were getting ourselves into and how we did not have a marketing budget, and also how we reinvested our own hard earned cash to keep the business afloat, when things went really bad. This would also be about How I gave away equity to raise funding to keep the business afloat, how bringing in new partners have helped the business, and what we are doing today that would change our financial books in the upcoming quarter etc.

This would be also a story on how we generated about 6 figures in USD in revenues a year, lost a lot to currency devaluation, business expenses and managed a very challenging customer base together with foreign service providers who would kick us out because of our customer base.

This would be a story of lessons I learnt through the journey, and challenges we faced and how you can develop your business to mitigate yourself from the kind of problems we ran into. I would go into details on our day to day experience, current, past and our future goals, visions and target.

This is a teaser post of the Nairahost story, so watch out for part 2, where I would strip Nairahost naked, as never done before.