The main reason why I have not been able to write is my full immersion into the startup life, beginning around April 2014.

Before that, I’d just dropped out and was trying to learn and absorb as much as I could, without a seeming direction. From operating systems to embedded technologies, I was skipping from topic to topic, trying to find direction and looking for something that would “stick”, before I finally kind of managed to settle on systems architecture and server-side development as a “niche”. I think I quite envy people who have “stumbled” upon their “calling” without having gone through that painful process1.

MyDoorHandle: The First Adventure

Around April 2014, I had joined Steven and Shaamiel who were building MyDoorHandle, at the time at Startup Garage in Woodstock Exchange.

MyDoorHandle was a software project aimed at democratizing the game of geo-referencing by allowing people to assign names to locations and share those with friends. It was my maiden voyage in terms of working on code that was going to go out into the market. I was super nervous.

I recall the project having 2 stumbling points:

  • Monetization strategy
  • Adoption

As time progressed, these motivated the team to seriously consider a pivot.

The Pivot to Folr

Fast forward a few weeks, all forces were focused on one endeavor: pushing out an alternative product, Folr. Folr was a more revenue-driven project, which used some of the same technology as MyDoorHandle and which was built by the same team. When I joined, it was already in the works, however not as the main focus.

Team Structure

  • Steven: Server and API
  • Shaamiel: Website
  • Me: Android app research and testing

The Product

The model was simple but effective:

  1. Fleet/mobile personnel owners and managers download the app
  2. Sign up and share with staff
  3. Track people and assets in near real-time
  4. Optional “ring fence” feature with alerts
  5. Motion replay functionality with detailed stop information

It was a pretty cool app, and we had not seen too many alternatives which accomplished what our app did, or not as comprehensively. We took it to several meter taxi companies and there was a fair amount of interest.

The Pivot That Wasn’t

Then came the plot twist. One of Folr’s investors insisted on pivoting to a “family-centric” service2. This meant:

  • Dropping all taxi industry leads
  • Aggressive rebranding
  • Feature transformation

But even this transformation wasn’t meant to be. About a month into the process, another bombshell dropped: a team in Singapore would take over parts of the development, and our work would essentially be scrapped.

The Final Push

The transition period was intense:

  • Servers got rewritten
  • APIs redesigned
  • Our orange UIs replaced with purple alternatives
  • Around-the-clock work (especially by Steven)

Some time after that, we got involved in a brand new project - one I am still busy with now. More on this later.

  1. The journey of finding one’s niche in tech can be particularly challenging when self-taught. ↩︎

  2. The investor’s exact words were that the easiest money would come from “jealous housewives in their late thirties who want to see what their husbands have been up to”. ↩︎