My First Step as a Founder — Inspired by One Google Meet
A few weeks ago, I realized I wanted to dive into being a founder, not just a developer. My first real step came from the most ordinary of places: a Google Meet.
About two months ago, a friend of mine—a digital marketer—was showing me LinkedIn optimization tips. While we were talking, he opened Google Maps, clicked through a bunch of websites and internal links, moving faster than I could follow. He was doing his job, killing two birds with one stone.
I asked him, “Bro, why is this so manual?”
He laughed and said, “The extensions that automate this are too expensive for Nigerians.”
That one sentence lit a fire in me. If there’s one thing I love, it’s turning a painful, repetitive manual process into a clean, one-click solution.
That night, I stayed up building the first version of what is now my Chrome extension, Email & Phone Extractor. It didn’t just crawl a website—it extracts visible contacts from the browser’s storage and internal databases, making it work even on sites where normal scrapers fail.
Here’s the truth: I’m still a complete novice in the founder journey. But I promised myself to start small, stay consistent, and learn loudly.
And here I am—launching my first product publicly. Not perfect. Not huge. But real. And I made it.
might be a useful thing
This is such a refreshing and honest founder story. It’s wild how the best ideas often come from the smallest moments — watching someone do a task manually and realizing, “Wait… this doesn’t have to be this hard.” The fact that you acted on that spark the same night says a lot about your builder instinct.
Also love that you tackled a very real, location-specific pain point. Tools being “too expensive for Nigerians” isn’t something most SaaS founders even think about — but solving that problem opens up a whole underserved market.
The product itself sounds solid too. Pulling contacts not just from the page but from browser storage/internal data is a clever workaround that most scrapers can’t handle.
You’re right: the founder journey is messy and you learn as you go — but what matters is that you shipped something real, useful, and born from an actual need.
Huge respect. Keep building loudly. The first product is always the hardest, and you already crossed that line.