Long Live Fucking Helloworld
Couple of years ago, Timi Ajiboye and I started a “digital agency” called Helloworld. We made websites and apps for clients.
At first we enjoyed it, but we later came to detest it. I don’t remember how annoying those clients were, but past me wrote about it.
When we met, Timi and I had both worked with ignorant, sneaky and outright condescending bosses who make you do a lot of work for very little money, who had no appreciation for what we were trying to do or be.
So, with our studio, we wanted to be different. We didn’t hire any staff. Instead, we worked with our peers and made sure to pay them fairly. We called it a collective.
But after a while, we got disillusioned. It was stressful and unrewarding to make basic websites for annoying people. So we started working on our own fun experiments.
We made:
- Cruncher, an app for browsing bank statements
- Eat.Drink.Bot, a recommendation engine for Lagos restaurants
- Timeline Expert, a trivia game for guessing who posted random tweets
- Twinder, a matchmaking Twitter bot
- Tix, an MVP for a self-ticketing platform
Eventually, we moved on to different things: me to Paystack, Timi to Buycoins and so on.
In the past five years, we’ve both learnt how to build teams, and now we can keep our jobs and still make all the stupid, fun ideas we come up with.
Helloworld is back, and we already have a backlog of ideas:
- Area, a decentralised virtual house
- Dotch, an app for splitting bills
- A new version of the Eat.Drink.Bot!
I revived this publication so we can share progress as we go. There’s absolutely no pressure. Might take a few months, might take a year to get these ideas working. But we’ll build them. Trust.
To all our friends (Onyekachi, 'Lolu, Segun Famisa, Efe Money e.t.c.) who built with us in the hey days, consider this a PSA.
Timi and Ope are back.
Long live Helloworld!
