Thread by @benskuhn

Why is building shiny tech more popular than tackling core problems head-on?

I’d guess because the most important trait for the latter is utterly stupid + painful amounts of determination.

For instance, here are some of the brick walls we bashed our heads against at Wave:

https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1361334386004799489

(Context: we’re building a mobile money system—a network of agents where people can deposit, withdraw, or send money—to replace banks in sub-Saharan Africa, where most people are unbanked because most banks are terrible.)

Our first attempt was to launch it as a "feature" of our existing, successful international money transfer product (sendwave.com)—you could send money from the US to our agent network in Ethiopia.

This failed because there was a massive currency black market. If you used informal remittances you could get a rate 25% higher than we could legally offer.

So we gave up and decided mobile money would be a ~completely separate business, built from scratch.

But launching separately failed too because there wasn’t enough demand for money transfer from Addis Ababa, where we started.

We learned the biggest demand was in the Somali region (sending money is a big part of Somali culture). So we uprooted our operations and moved there.

Our Somali region launch failed because the internet wasn’t good enough. We originally built a smartphone app, which worked ok in Addis, but was non-functional even in Jijiga, the Somali region’s capital.

So we rebuilt the system using USSD (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSD) instead.

That had amazing traction, but eventually failed too because we ended up having to end our pilot in Ethiopia (long story).

We looked at other markets and decided to try Nigeria, since it was the biggest single market in Africa and didn’t have good mobile money yet.

The Nigeria launch failed because our money transfer value prop wasn’t as good.

That was because banks were better there—they allowed instant interbank transfers. So many people used a bank account like mobile money (even if they lived really far from a bank branch).

So we rebuilt ourselves again—people could link their bank to Wave and use our agents to withdraw.

That failed because it was too hard to build anything interesting on top of it. We wanted to be NG’s economic rails, not a glorified ATM.

So we up and moved again, to Senegal.

That failed before launch: One of the telecoms had a big competing mobile money system. So we couldn’t get USSD like in ET/NG.

We ruled out smartphones due to low market share. Instead, we built a flow where users scanned an NFC sticker (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-fiel…) at the agent.

Stickers failed because they were too hard to read if attached to a metal phone. Plus the NFC readers we gave to agents kept breaking and were a huge pain to work with.

So we gave up on NFC and redesigned based on cards with QR codes printed on (plus SMS as 2nd auth factor).

Once that was going well we tried to expand into using Wave to pay for things at shops. We spent months on a pilot project.

It failed because even shopkeepers didn’t consistently have smartphones. It was too hard to get a critical mass of Wave merchants in one place.

So we re-focused on scaling the QR card thing, which was still trucking along. But that failed too because we didn’t know how to run an agent network at massive scale.

So we hired someone who could—one of my colleagues connected us to someone who’d scaled 4 other agent networks.

And... then everything worked! We plastered the country with agents, built a companion smartphone app for the 50% of people that did have phones, added the ability to pay bills with Wave. Growth took off and hasn’t slowed down yet.

Finally!!

But... that’s 10 major failures over ~4 years. It was HARD to make it through these. Each one felt company-threatening.

Luckily for us, Wave’s founders had a totally unreasonable-seeming amount of conviction (100% justified in retrospect!!) and pulled it through.

How did they end up with so much conviction?

Probably related to the 2 years they spent building *ten plus* failed social mobile apps before finding their original breakout success (Sendwave—intl $ transfer).

They’d already been through this and could see the light at the end.

(Fun fact: the Wave name and penguin logo were originally for one of the social apps! It was a mobile group video chat app. They reused the name/logo for money transfer because people liked the branding more than the rest of the app 🙃)

The other part that gave us conviction, of course, was the looks on people’s faces when we *did* manage to build something they wanted.

One conversation with someone for whom your app has changed their life will get you through a lot, lot, lot of bad days (or years).

I think that’s our most unusual strength—more than being great at product/tech/ops—we just keep. f’ing. trying. when it seems like we should give up and go home.

You can read plenty of platitudes about the power of determination, but I hope this puts some color to them :)

Addendum: My partner correctly points out that being unreasonably determined on its own isn't enough. You need to be determined *and smart about it.*

If you're determined about the wrong thing, you'll end up like the Time Cube guy instead of like Wave.

I think PG's "relentlessly resourceful" is the best concept-handle for the right attitude to have: paulgraham.com/relres.html