Early Stage Startup Mistakes

Talemia
3 min readOct 15, 2021

…mistakes will occur, identify the problem and evolve

Obafemi Darabidan Group COO, Coralstone Capital Ltd

Hey Tribe
TGIF!
Hope you had a productive week

Today’s article is from our podcast session (on Kleekpod)with Obafemi Darabidan, Group COO at Coralstone Capital Limited and a member of the founding team at Fundbae. He is an astute Banking and Finance Professional, with a demonstrated industry experience in the Nigerian financial services industry. He is a tech enthusiast, a life plan certified advisor for small businesses and a lover of Jesus.

The session focused on early stage startup mistakes.

How did you get into the Tech Start-up Space?

The thought of how we can get into the world of finance with tools that are easily accessible by people drove me and some of my colleagues into the tech space. We needed to leverage on tech as a finance provider and apply technology to finance.

What are some of the key mistakes you made while starting out?

Every mistake is a trigger to think outside the box

Like one of my favorite techpreneurs says , start-ups make so many mistakes. The challenge to identify the root cause of what failed or what did not work is actually the real work, it is the toughest part.

Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst — Eric Reis

The tech space is evolving and the complexities are evolving as well. What worked yesterday will not work today.

Mistake 1: Having a rigid plan

This will limit your creativity. Being boxed in will limit your creative juice. Be open minded, receive feedback from your environment, other techpreneurs and try to see what worked and didn’t in other sectors, and figure out how you can implement it into your work.

Mistake 2: Not budgeting

We just wanted to develop something and get people on it. As the development evolved we found out that there was a financial burden attached to it. It is very important to budget and make room for as much miscellaneous as possible, so you will be able to accommodate whatever change requests are coming from your IT team and market changes.

What makes Fundbae stand out? How do you think start-ups can leverage on it?

Fundbae is different from your other Fintech apps as it is a one-stop shop for financial solutions. Fundbae is your bae to borrow money or keep money, it can help you monitor your spending and income, there is a dollar wallet to keep money in foreign currencies. It also pays you on a daily basis based on your savings. We have lots of financial professionals in-house that you can be rest assured that your money is in safe hands

Final Words
Be patient. Be Aware. Be Flexible. As things evolve, your original idea may need to also scale in tandem with what the market wants. Make sure your products are meeting the market demands per time. KEEP INNOVATING

There you go
Stay flexible and grow with the evolving space
You can listen to the podcast HERE

You can connect with Obafemi on Linkedin, Instagram and Facebook

Tell us an amazing African Tech Startup Founder you want us to feature next.

ADon’t forget to check back every week for new content specially curated to help, educate and teach you on your journey as a founder.

You can check out other expressions of Talemia HERE

Are you building a tech startup and want us to feature you or know someone who is?
Tweet at us: @talemiahq
Email us: talemiahq@gmail.com

Let us help you gain traction faster than you can on your own. We are doing this for other African founders who have joined Buildr. Click HERE

--

--

Talemia

We’re creating opportunities and designing experiences for early stage African founders to move from 0 to 1