29th December, 2025
2025 was a foundational year for Akowe. As a founder, I often see myself as a music conductor, conducting an orchestra. The timely coordination of all the different instruments, their timed highs and lows, their staggered interjections, the call and response, the attentiveness of the musicians themselves to the conductor, all of that and more, put together, forms the beautiful music that audiences might eventually clap to or stand in ovation for.
Juggling multiple things is an integral part of running any business. At startups, where often, there are more questions than answers, this often raises the stake higher, especially if you have received external investments.
Managing internal teams, Leading your management team, listening for public nuance on what you are building, navigating local and international partnerships, staying and operating within regulatory boundaries, even when sometimes, there are no regulations, presenting your business case to investors, reviewing all the different types of decks, dealing with legal, and accounts, even when competent people handle all these for you, the buck still stops at your table.
What did I learn in 2025? I learned many a thing! My top 4 lessons are listed below.
Your digital product needs a hook to make it have meaning!
Ordinarily, a great product idea is often broad at the start. Let’s create an app where people can save money. That’s broad. But people will likely not use it until you provide a meaningful hook. People already save money, so what’s your angle? Well, money you save here can be specifically for your house rent, and we’ll give you tools to automate the savings. And you suddenly have a (winning) hook that is more specific. Ask PiggyVest!
As part of our products suite at Akowe, we built Credenza, a credential wallet for all the people receiving digital certificates from Akowe. A secure place to store your credentials. Well, people already use google drive and other online storage, what’s your angle? Well, you can request your WAEC, GCE and NECO Certificates directly from WAEC and NECO via Credenza. Now that’s a hook that gives meaning to your broad idea. The requests started pouring in and haven’t stopped since then. Find your meaningful hook.
Learn to delegate.
It’s impossible to grow a company all by yourself. You need competent people around you. But if you are a hands-on founder, you may find it hard to let people do their work even after you have hired them, and you may not even know that you are interfering because that has always been your work ethic.
Sometime around mid 2025, one of the c-suite execs at Akowe sat me down and specifically told me to hands-off some tasks. It took this notice, for me to notice that I had to take some back seats. And guess what happened?
I suddenly found that I had more time to myself. Most tasks were already being handled. I then had time for more strategic tasks.
If you are bogged down by running through operations, you might miss the direction you should be steering the entire ship. Learn to delegate.
Remain Hands on!
When hiring junior staff, it’s often an unspoken rule to have a pretty good idea of how to do what you are hiring for. If you don’t, more often than not, that junior staff will run circles around you without driving meaningful productivity.
As your business grows and you gradually leave operations to your ICs (ICs are Independent Contributors. They are the operators in your business doing the daily manual grind). Be prepared to train them, show them how you want them to do what needs to be done, then leave them to it. Let them make their mistakes, because that’s the only way they would learn. Hopefully, they don’t cost your business too much in their learning process and if they do, you use that as a yardstick to set your SOPs and your reward and punishment systems.
Answering 50 to 60 new requests on WhatsApp per day became a new routine. My experience as a trainer in the Facebook-sponsored Boost Your Business with Facebook training between 2018 and 2023 came in very handy.
Setting up quick replies, labels, follow up routines, processes for executing the customer requests and the constant fine tuning of that process, and then cascading this entire system to the appropriate team members was entirely my job.
You’re the music conductor, not the violinist or the cellist. You can probably play both instruments passably, but that’s no longer your day job as CEO, but if push comes to shove, you can fold your sleeves and get the job done by yourself.
As the business grows and you have more competence and efficiency around you, you will have less need of getting into the nitty gritty.
Do it manually first, then automate.
This, I would say was the biggest lesson of all. While sometimes you know the theory of things, it’s different when you actually put it into practice.
We had the opportunity to build a new solution for the legal industry, I’ll share more about this in a subsequent post. The solution was simple but it required an immediate activation. Waiting for the build was simply out of the question.
We decided to manually create the outputs that the solution will produce in order to meet the immediate needs of the client.
That singular move, drove us straight to revenues rather than waiting for the web application to be ready before arriving at revenue.
There are many more lessons, the nature of which are still unfolding and I can scarcely speak about them yet.
If you are reading this, I hope you gained some value and I hope 2026 will be bountiful for you.
Stay tuned for more.
