At this point, I probably sound like a broken record whenever I mention my goal for 2026.
But if you’re new here, allow me to bring you up to speed.
At the beginning of this year, I set myself a rather unusual challenge: monetize one product every month.
The twist is that I wasn’t planning to build these products in 2026. That work had already been done. Throughout 2025, I challenged myself to build one product every month. The objective for 2026 was simple—or at least it sounded simple on paper. Instead of constantly creating new things, I wanted to prove that the products could actually become businesses.
So far, the journey has looked something like this:
- January was dedicated to commercializing Eliday Solutions Ltd.
- February focused on To Somewhere Logistics.
- March was all about Startup List Africa.
- April was dedicated to InterviewPrep, a platform that helps job seekers improve their CVs and prepare for interviews.
- May broke the pattern. Instead of monetizing an existing product, I built a completely new one because I believed it would make the commercialization process significantly easier going forward.
If you’d like to understand why I intentionally broke my own rules, I explain the reasoning in the May update.
Before we continue, there is something else worth mentioning.
June happens to be my birthday month.
So, if you’ve been following this journey and wondering how you can support it, I’d love for you to try one of the products I’ve been building. Better yet, try the one I launched this month—provided, of course, that it genuinely solves a problem you’re facing.
That would make a pretty good birthday gift.
The Problem I Couldn’t Ignore
This month was really a continuation of the work I started in May.
Rather than jumping to another product, I doubled down on making the lead management platform production-ready for everyone else.
If you’ve ever run a business—or even attempted to sell something—you’ll understand this frustration.
Building the product is difficult.
Finding customers is even harder.
When I started commercializing the products I had built in 2025, I quickly realized that I wasn’t spending most of my time improving the products.
I was spending it looking for people who might need them.
Every morning, the routine was almost identical.
Open Google Maps.
Search for businesses.
Copy their details.
Paste them into a spreadsheet.
Check whether I had already contacted them.
Look for a phone number.
Look for a website.
Look for an email address.
Repeat.
Again.
And again.
And again.
It wasn’t just boring.
It was painfully inefficient.
The irony wasn’t lost on me either.
I had spent an entire year building software that solved problems, yet my own sales process was held together by spreadsheets, browser tabs, and a lot of copy-pasting.
Eventually I reached the same conclusion that many founders arrive at.
Sometimes the biggest bottleneck in your business is not your product.
It’s your process.
Introducing Mtejaly
That realization led to this month’s product.
Mtejaly is a specialized local business prospecting platform built for agencies, consultants, freelancers, sales teams, and anyone who relies on outbound sales.
At its core, it automates the process of discovering businesses on Google Maps/facebook/linkendIn, organizing their information, and helping users manage prospects from one place.
But describing it as “a Google Maps scraper” or “Leads Scrapper” doesn’t really do it justice.
The goal was never to build another scraping tool.
The goal was to build a complete workflow.
One where you can:
- Search for businesses in virtually any location.
- Generate hundreds of qualified prospects within minutes.
- Organize those leads into projects.
- Keep track of outreach.
- Avoid collecting duplicate information.
- Build repeatable sales pipelines instead of starting from scratch every week.
Instead of spending hours manually compiling prospect lists, users can focus on what actually grows a business—starting conversations with potential customers.
That’s the problem Mtejaly solves.
Why I Built It
What’s interesting is that I never planned to build Mtejaly.
In fact, I specifically told myself that 2026 would not be another product-building year.
It would be a commercialization year.
But reality has a funny way of challenging carefully written plans.
Every month I found myself running into the exact same bottleneck.
Finding leads.
Managing them.
Following up consistently.
Knowing who had already been contacted.
Knowing who hadn’t.
The more I repeated the process, the clearer it became that this wasn’t just my problem.
Thousands of agencies, consultants, freelancers, and small businesses experience the same thing every single day.
And that’s usually a good sign that the problem is worth solving.
So instead of continuing to fight the process, I decided to improve it.
I built the tool I wished I had from the very beginning.
Ironically, this single decision might end up helping me commercialize every other product much faster.
Sometimes the shortest path forward involves taking a small detour.
Focus Is Becoming More Important Than Building
One lesson keeps becoming clearer every month.
Building products is exciting.
Commercializing them is hard.
Maintaining them is even harder.
Looking back, building twelve products in 2025 taught me more than I could have imagined.
It sharpened my technical skills.
It forced me to become a faster builder.
It improved my design process.
It introduced me to entirely new industries.
But there’s another lesson I didn’t fully appreciate until now.
Focus compounds.
Distraction compounds too.
When you’re building twelve different products, each product only receives a fraction of your attention.
When you’re trying to market twelve different products, none of them receive enough attention to truly succeed.
I used to believe the bottleneck was building software.
Today I believe the bottleneck is sustained execution.
Success rarely comes from launching.
It usually comes from improving, listening, marketing, refining, repeating, and doing that over a very long period of time.
That is far less glamorous than announcing a brand-new product every month.
But it’s far more valuable.
A Difficult Decision
Which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about for several months.
I’m bringing the “12 products in 12 months” commercialization challenge to a gradual halt.
Not because I failed.
Not because the products don’t work.
But because I’ve realized that continuing the challenge would pull me away from what matters most.
A business doesn’t become successful because you launched it.
It becomes successful because you continue working on it long after the excitement of launch disappears.
One month simply isn’t enough time to give a product the attention it deserves.
You barely have time to gather customer feedback before you’re already moving on to the next thing.
That isn’t sustainable.
Nor is it the best use of my energy.
Instead, I’m choosing to narrow my focus.
Rather than spreading myself across every product I built in 2025, I’ll concentrate on a handful that have the strongest potential.
The ones with real customer demand.
The ones solving meaningful problems.
The ones that deserve years of improvement instead of weeks of attention.
I’ll share more details in a future update about which products made that list—and why.
Mtejaly Is Ready
The good news is that Mtejaly is no longer just an internal tool.
It’s ready for everyone.
If you’re an agency looking for clients…
A freelancer trying to build a prospect list…
A consultant searching for businesses to approach…
Or simply someone who spends too much time collecting business information manually…
Give it a try.
There’s a free plan available, which should be more than enough for individuals and anyone just getting started.
I’d genuinely love to hear what you think.
Some of the best improvements I’ve made to previous products came directly from user feedback.
So if something works well, let me know.
If something doesn’t, definitely let me know.
Software gets better through conversations.
Looking Back
One thing I’ve enjoyed about writing these monthly updates is that they force me to slow down.
It’s easy to become so consumed by the next feature, the next sale, or the next project that you forget how much progress has already been made.
A year ago, Mtejaly didn’t exist.
Neither did several of the systems I’m now using every single day.
Some ideas never made it beyond prototypes.
Others quietly evolved into products that people are actually using.
Progress rarely feels dramatic while you’re living through it.
It only becomes obvious when you look backward.
That’s another reason I intend to continue documenting this journey.
Not because every month is filled with major wins.
But because the small decisions eventually become the story.
What’s Next?
The second half of 2026 is going to look different.
Less building.
More improving.
Less chasing new ideas.
More doubling down on the ones that have already proven themselves.
More conversations with customers.
More marketing.
More distribution.
More refinement.
I genuinely believe this is where the real work begins.
Anyone can build software.
The challenge is building a business around it.
And that’s exactly what I intend to spend the rest of the year doing.
Thank You
If you’ve made it this far, thank you.
Whether you’ve been following since the beginning of 2025 or you’ve only recently discovered these updates, I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to read them.
Building products can sometimes feel like a solitary journey, but knowing that people are reading, sharing feedback, and occasionally trying the products makes it far more meaningful.
If you’d like to support the journey, the best way is simple.
Sign up and give Mtejaly a try.
If it helps your business even a little, then building it was worth it.
And if you know someone who struggles with finding local business leads, feel free to share it with them.
Until next month, it’s back to work.
If you’re curious about where this entire journey began, you can start with my very first monthly update from January 2025:
January 2025 Recap: Progress, Lessons, and What’s Next
Or, if you’d rather read the entire story from the beginning, every monthly update has been compiled under Journey to Profitability.
I think you’ll notice something interesting.
The products have changed.
The plans have changed.
Even my thinking has changed.
But one thing hasn’t.
The commitment to keep building businesses that solve real problems.
