The ₦100 We Made And the Vision That Built Flowdiary

 

It was around 10:00pm, Friday, 24th February, 2023. I was at the INEC office, in the middle of election preparations, when my phone rang.

"Am I speaking with Mohiddeen?"

"Yes, this is me," I answered, waiting to hear what he had to say.

"Masha Allah. I'm one of your customers from Stackplaza. I just called to say thank you. Because of your platform, I've been able to do business, I've gotten customers, and I've been genuinely blessed."

It wasn't the first time someone had used our services and given us that kind of compliment. But this particular one moved me more than the others. Why?

Because from the day we started Stackplaza in 2021, until the day we sold it in 2023, we only ever made ₦100 in revenue.

Yes — ₦100. Not ₦100,000. Not ₦10,000. Just ₦100.

And even that came from ads. Around that time, we'd introduced a new feature: if you wanted your products featured on the top pages, you paid for ads. If I remember correctly, that was around the same period we rolled out Shopper Carts — where instead of a direct peer-to-peer transaction, we would handle the whole transaction ourselves, payments and logistics included.

When we launched it, I was a final-year student at Federal University Gashua. I used to walk from shop to shop around town, handing out my business cards, opening accounts for shop owners, taking photos of their goods, and listing them myself.

Sometimes I'd go back to a shop and the owner would tell me someone had reached out wanting their goods — but the buyer lived too far away. Every time I heard that, I'd sit down again and think about how to make it easier for buyers to find sellers near them. That's how the state-based business linking feature came about: once you opened the platform, the first things you saw were goods from sellers near you, or in your own state.

By the time school started getting demanding, I'd spend my weekends at my boss's cafe instead, working there — sometimes alongside Malam Usman Kafur. We kept at it like that all the way to 2023.

That phone call, the customer thanking me, reminded me of a story about Jack Ma. He once went to eat at a restaurant, and was told that someone had already paid for his meal. When he asked why, the man said he was Jack Ma's customer — that he'd paid for the meal simply because he'd been blessed using his platform and had made money from it.

"But I know for a fact you don't make any money from AliExpress," the man told him.

And he was right.

So — what lessons do I take from all this?

1. Vision is capital.

Whatever you're building, look at the vision behind it, not just what's in front of you today. There were times we'd simply pay to travel somewhere, book a hotel, spend money we didn't have to spare — just to attend an event — because we knew we'd gain something from it. Maybe connections.

Have you noticed that most of the successes young people get today don't come from the people they grew up around? They come from far away. Social media, events, the internet. If you stay in that world long enough, you start to see that many of the biggest things you'll ever receive in life come from people you meet somewhere else entirely. You go to an event, you meet someone, you save each other's contacts, and one day they come across an opportunity and think of you — and you get it.

2. Every lesson we learned along the way shaped how we build Flowdiary today.

Fewer mistakes. Better execution. Sharper communication. New marketing strategies. More professional products. Real talent. Better design. Old connections that still matter. Unapologetic passion and resilience — everything.

We didn't start with Stackplaza, but Stackplaza helped shape all of this. I say this not to boast, but because everything we've built since, we've built in earnest. There's no playing around in the story of building a company — not for us. Even when I launched my very first startup back in our village, Bayamari, in January 2017, we weren't playing around then either. Neither were we with Stackplaza.

3. No succeed in life, one must make sacrifice

May the soul of Nasir Mahuta continue to rest in peace, amin. After he wrote his book, Sirrin Crypto and was preparing to launch and sell it, I asked him to let us sell a portion of the book on Stackplaza.

He agreed, and connected me with his assistant, Shamsuddeen Yusuf. Whenever a copy was sold on Stackplaza, I'd redirect the order so Shamsu could put the book in a car and send it to the customer. And you know what? I paid the transport fare out of my own pocket. We'd set aside ₦1,000 for the fare, but by the time he reached the motor park, they'd ask for ₦2,000, or ₦1,500 — whatever it was, I paid the difference myself.

There was even a phone my brother, Aliyu, once advertised to me from a friend of his in Damaturu. I told him, if I was going to buy it, it had to be listed on Stackplaza first — and that's exactly what we did. Through all of it, one thing I held onto was the belief that, one day, God willing, we'd succeed. There was a time our hosting and domain subscription expired, and I sold my own phone to renew it. That's how we learned sacrifice — because there's no gain without pain.

Anyone can start building something. But it's resilience that separates who actually builds and who doesn't. Don't focus on what you can get right now — focus on what it will become. In most cases, the people who only look at what they can get today are the ones who never end up building anything. You'll notice it when someone starts learning a new skill: the first thing they ask is how much money they can make from it, right away.

That's why Engr. Ibrahim Auwal, Flowdiary's CTO, always says: we're building Flowdiary so that even after we're gone, others can pick up exactly where we left off. It's meant to keep solving problems for years to come — and even now, looking at the full roadmap of our vision, we haven't seen half of it yet.

These days, it's rare for three or four days to pass without a message from some Flowdiary student telling me they've received a blessing — a job, an opportunity, a connection — because of something they learned or someone they met through Flowdiary. That alone is enough. Some days, when I go quiet, it's because I'm sitting with the thought that yes, this is exactly why we started this company. Masha Allah.

So here's my advice to the young people out there who dream of changing the world: don't look at what you'll get right now. None of the young people who ever truly changed the world were chasing quick fixes.

May God Almighty guide us, and grant us good fortune. Amin.