Happy New Year!… Sort of.

It’s crazy in Nigeria right now. From tomorrow, most banks won’t let you use your Naira ATM cards (Mastercard and Visa) for international payments because the banks can’t get their hands on enough Greenbacks (dollars) to settle the payments. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

When 2015 started, I started to worry. I had all these goals I wanted to achieve and I knew where I wanted my life to be in 2015, but It just wasn't there. So I started working hard, harder than I have ever worked in my life.

By April, I had launched www.TryCoursify.com. An Open-Source online course platform to allow Bloggers and Authors who want to teach courses online, to create online schools easily.

The launch went fairly well. 11,000 people checked it out on the first day but apart from a few consulting job offers, it wasn't really profitable.

On the first of April I turned 24 and now, I was full-on freaking out. The goals I set in January (which included “starting this blog”) were not even near met and I was working 12–14 hour days.

By the end of May, of course, I was burnt out.

So I decided to go back to design for a while. I took a 3 month break to brush up my design skills.

I launched www.StartupDesignBuffet.com in August when I came back. It’s been a pretty consistent source of design work but it hasn’t been as profitable as I hoped because of the low price. I’ll be shutting it down before the new year (tomorrow).

In September, www.codingfounders.com launched and that was my most profitable project of the year. I have another course coming up in January and that would be the last programming course I’m ever going to teach.

What I’m up to now.

Front-End Web Development

A Nigerian Startup reached out to me to help out with their app. I love their business model and the product is very needed in Nigeria right now, so I decided to join the team. I can’t talk about the company until we launch.

Online Education

I got into this Startup thing 3 years ago, so I could help make quality education accessible to anyone that’s willing to learn. TryCoursify was my first attempt and I was looking to shut it down, but I met an Investor (an early twitter employee) at a SeedCamp event in London and he offered to help me out.

So I put a small team together and started working on Coursify again. We’ll relaunch at the end of January with a complete SAAS Online School Platform.

My Biggest Lesson in 2015

2015 for me has been a wild roller-coaster ride, filled with a lot of joy and my fair share of disappointments.

One thing I noticed this year that has stifled my progress a lot, is saying YES to too many projects. I have taken on more work In the past two years than I had time to complete and it lead me to burn out, miss deadlines, produce mediocre work and disappoint a few people.

It’s only in the last few months that I really started to get this under control and I am determined in 2016 not to make the same mistakes again.

New Year’s Resolution

So my only “Resolution” for 2016 is to only make promises that I am 100% sure I can keep and I have started doing this already, because I learnt last year that it’s only the resolutions you start before the New Year that make it.

Okay, one more. I’ll also write at least two posts every week in 2016. My original goal was to start this blog in April 2015, but as with so many even more important things in my life this year, I just kept pushing it back.

I’ve got a new set of goals (and fun projects) lined up for 2016. In an upcoming post, I’ll tell you what they are why I’m almost 100% sure I’ll achieve them all.

Welcome to my blog.

PS: I was also going to give up Sugar in 2016. I made it till September this year but I can’t do that in 2016 and I’ll tell you why in my next post.

PPS: If you liked my first post, please hit the Recommend button below so others can find it and hit the Follow Button above (top right) to get notified when I write something new.

Happy New Year and God Bless You.