mysub began in nairobi in dec, 2022. i was visiting a close friend, and my co-founder and i spent a few afternoons watching the friction of people trying to move in the same direction. whether it was pooling money for a rental or trying to coordinate a dinner bill without a dozen screenshots and verbal promises, the process was broken. it was a lot of human energy spent on something that should have been invisible.
the first version of the app was built in three days. we used to joke that we could move from an idea to a functional mvp in the time it took most people to send a calendar invite. my co-founder is celeriously adroit with fleshing out systems, and i have a sort of mind-muscle memory for user flows that lets me bypass the usual second-guessing. when we get into that rhythm, the distance between thinking of a tool and actually using it just disappears. in the beginning, the momentum felt effortless.
that first year was bliss. we hit profitability early, and for a while, the thing we built was actually solving the problem we’d seen in nairobi. but v1 was strictly us testing the waters. we wanted mysub to be the default infrastructure for shared finances, which meant eventually moving to v2. we wanted to open the platform up so others could manage their own bill-splitting and resource pooling.
there was a lot of skepticism about that transition. we had something that worked and was making money, so the push to change it felt counterintuitive. it reminded me of the apple philosophy of keeping everything closed and controlled, but the goal for mysub was always for it to be used by others, not just managed by us. v2 was the realization of that, even if it meant giving up the simplicity of the early days.
then the reality of the environment caught up. it is hard to describe the “stochasticism” of trying to track profit and loss when the ground is constantly shifting. we were reporting earnings to investors in dollars while our customers paid in naira. watching the rate move from 400 to 1300 was a different kind of pressure. i remember being at a basketball court, looking at the numbers on my phone, and feeling the sheer weight of it. no one predicts that kind of volatility. it throws your balance off in a way that no amount of efficacious structuring can fix.
this week, a private company acquired mysub. as part of that transition, the product is now defunct.
the finality of it has been quiet. i’ve spent the last few weeks buried in the business operations of an ending. my days were consumed by the ledgers. we had to make sure every seller was settled and every buyer with unused funds received their refund. we added a little extra for some of our sellers, a small acknowledgement of the time they spent with us. i was mostly just excited that we could handle the closing off this way, without the usual chaos. there is a specific, repetitive labor in winding down a company. it is a lot of bank reconciliations and manual verifications, ensuring that when the lights go out, the books are perfectly balanced to zero.
i’ve realized that the real work of a founder isn’t just the three-day sprints or the initial rush of traction. it is the stewardship that follows. once you are responsible for other people’s money, the project stops being about your own curiosity and starts being about the promises you’ve made. there is a relief in knowing we kept those promises all the way to the last day. we didn’t just walk away. we did the accounting.
what happens to the product now is no longer mine to decide. what happens next to me is.
lately, i’ve been sitting at my desk without any specific urgency. i’m dabbling in some algorithmic trading and running small ai experiments, mostly just poking at models and logic to see how they respond. it is not a new venture or a pivot per se. there is no particular roadmap or positioning. i am just enjoying the feeling of being curious about a system without having to worry about how it scales or who is waiting on a payout. it has been a long time since i built something just to see if it would work.
the accounts are settled. the balances are at zero. that’s enough.
onward.