When I started 2026, I made a promise to myself.
No more building.
Well, at least not in the way I had done in 2025.
For those who have followed this journey, you know that 2025 was a ridiculous year of experimentation. I challenged myself to build 12 products in 12 months. Some were good. Some were bad. Some solved real problems, and some were simply proof that I could turn an idea into something tangible.
By the time the year ended, I had a collection of products.
But I also had an uncomfortable realization.
Building products is exciting. Selling them is hard.
So the mission for 2026 was simple: commercialize what already existed.
No new shiny ideas.
No new products.
No hiding behind the comfort of coding.
Just the uncomfortable work of putting products in front of customers and hearing “no” enough times until someone finally says “yes.”
The year began exactly as planned.
January was dedicated to commercializing Eliday Solutions Ltd.
February followed with To Somewhere Logistics.
March was dedicated to Startup List Africa.
April was about InterviewPrep, a tool designed to help job seekers improve their CVs and prepare for interviews.
Four months in, one lesson became painfully obvious.
Commercialization is a numbers game.
The reality is that many great products never fail because they are bad.
They fail because not enough people know they exist.
As founders, we sometimes spend months obsessing over features, user interfaces, technology choices, and tiny improvements that nobody asked for.
We convince ourselves that if the product is good enough, people will magically find it.
They don’t.
The internet is a noisy place.
A great product hidden in a corner of the internet is still hidden.
The responsibility of a founder is not only to build something useful. It is to make sure enough people know it exists.
This realization completely changed my approach to sales.
I stopped waiting for people to discover the products.
I started actively looking for potential customers.
My process was simple.
Find companies or individuals who could benefit from the product.
Collect their information.
Reach out.
Follow up.
Repeat.
The primary source of my leads was Google Maps. I would manually search for businesses, collect their details, organize them in Excel, assign them to team members, and track the outreach process.
It worked.
But it was painful.
Anyone who has managed sales manually through a spreadsheet knows the struggle.
Rows keep increasing.
Columns keep multiplying.
Different team members make different edits.
Someone changes a status accidentally.
Someone forgets to update their progress.
Duplicates appear.
Soon, what started as an organized list becomes a document that everyone fears touching.
The system that was supposed to make us efficient slowly became the bottleneck.
Naturally, I started searching for a solution.
There are hundreds of CRM and lead management tools available in the market.
I tried several options.
Some were too complicated for what I needed.
Others had a learning curve that did not make sense for a small and focused sales process.
And some were simply too expensive for the stage we are currently at.
I didn’t need a giant enterprise system.
I needed something simple.
A place where my team could find leads, assign ownership, update progress, and maintain a clean record of our sales activities.
A small problem.
A very specific problem.
And unfortunately, I could not find a tool that solved it exactly the way I wanted.
That is when the builder in me started becoming restless.
The same builder that I had promised to keep quiet throughout 2026.
The same person who had spent 2025 saying, “What if I just built it myself?”
And honestly, I resisted for a while.
Because I knew the danger.
For founders, building can become a form of procrastination.
It feels like progress.
You can point at lines of code, new features, and a beautiful interface and say, “Look how much I achieved today.”
Sales is different.
Sales gives you rejection.
Sales gives you unanswered emails.
Sales forces you to confront whether the market actually cares.
Building is comfortable.
Selling is vulnerable.
And that is exactly why I had promised myself to focus on commercialization.
But this time was different.
This wasn’t me chasing a new idea because I was bored.
This wasn’t another product built from curiosity.
This was a tool designed to remove a bottleneck that was slowing down the commercialization of every other product.
So in May, I broke my own rule.
I built a lead management tool.
A simple platform designed around how my team actually works.
A place to import leads, organize them, assign responsibilities, track conversations, and create accountability in our sales process.
The month was busy.
Very busy.
There were days when I questioned whether I was falling back into old habits.
Was I avoiding sales?
Was I once again choosing the comfort of building over the difficulty of selling?
Those were difficult questions to ask myself.
But as the tool started being used internally, the answer became clearer.
Our efficiency improved significantly.
The sales process became cleaner.
Everyone knew what they were working on.
The team spent less time searching through spreadsheets and more time actually contacting potential customers.
The tool had done exactly what it was supposed to do.
It removed friction.
And now I find myself facing another interesting question.
Could this tool become a product of its own?
That was never the original intention.
It was built for internal use.
But many successful products started exactly this way — as solutions to problems their creators personally experienced.
So I am paying attention.
I am watching how we use it.
I am identifying what works and what doesn’t.
I am resisting the temptation to immediately turn it into a massive project with countless features.
For now, it has one job.
Help us sell better.
If, along the way, it proves valuable enough for other teams and businesses, then perhaps it will have its own journey.
That is the beauty of building.
Sometimes you set out to create one thing and accidentally discover another opportunity.
As May comes to an end, I still believe the mission for 2026 remains unchanged.
Commercialization.
Distribution.
Customers.
Revenue.
The work of proving that what was built in 2025 deserves a place in the market.
This month may have looked like a detour.
But I don’t think it was.
I think it was an investment in the machine that will help us move faster for the rest of the year.
Sometimes discipline does not mean refusing to change direction.
Sometimes discipline means understanding why you are changing direction and ensuring the change serves the larger mission.
May reminded me of that.
The builder is still alive.
He probably always will be.
The difference now is that he has a job.
He builds things that help us reach customers.
Not things that distract us from them.
The journey continues.
And as always, thank you for reading and following along.
For those who do not know how and where this journey began, you can read the first chapter here:
See you in the next update.
