Seenly

After having taken the plunge to work on Seenly full time I couldn't help but share with my best mate, Joel, how much I was enjoying the freedom and challenge of working on my own product. It was exciting for me and infectious for Joel.

We'd always spoken about how our goal was to create a business together, ever since we were in school, and we'd even tried (and failed) before. But it'd been some time since then and life had taken us to opposite sides of the world. Yet, the goal remained strong in our minds.

As it turns out the different paths in life had prepared us well. I had spend years learning how to build software and now felt confident I could build from zero while Joel had transitioned away from his software development background into a Head of Technology role where he learned how to scale a startup, build a team, grow a product, and work with users to get a deeper understanding of their problems.

So after months of listening to me talk about Seenly and giving me advice the wheels of life turned again and Joel agreed to join me as a co-founder. It was the right time for him and I couldn't have been more grateful to have someone come on board that could bring strengths in areas that I felt the weakest.

After spending more than 10 years learning the craft of software development the time had come for me to leave the comfort of a salary job and venture into the great unknown of the startup world.

The question was simple; can I build my own successful product? I'd worked on several successful products for other people so how hard could it be to create my own?

The first step was to identify a space that I thought I could succeed in. I had a few criteria:

• A small enough product that a single developer could achieve something meaningful. Don't be too ambitious.
• In a proven market that has shown a willingness to pay for a good product. Don't try to invent a market.
• Be in a global market. Big enough that serving even a small niche can reward you with success.
• A self serve B2C product. Don't be at the mercy of big enterprise sales contracts.

With that criteria in mind I set upon the journey. After many missteps (often being too ambitious) I settled on developing Seenly.

Seenly is a social media management app. It allows users to create and manage their social content across several social media platforms. This is a huge global market and there's already many successful businesses in this space however there's certainly room for improvement there.

So let the challenge begin...