Yeah, Okay, That's Fine.
Part 2 of the series. Last time I told you about the €2,000 app that stayed “almost ready” for nineteen months. That essay was about the money. This one is about the fifteen years wrapped around the money. If you haven’t read Part 1, go back. The “friend of a friend of a friend” in this story is the same one who came back to bite me.
We were 5 friends.
We knew each other from church in Nigeria. JS3, so around thirteen years old. We were all bright and brilliant students, and bright students find each other, so the five of us naturally gravitated together. I remember what we did for fun: after service we would sit together and debate chemistry. Somebody would bring a hard question and we’d go back and forth, everybody trying to show he was smarter than the other, but in a friendly way. That was our idea of a good time.
One of the five is the friend this essay is about. I won’t use his name. He’s like a brother to me. We didn’t just grow up together, we developed each other. He is part of the people who formed me.
He said no for years. He was right.
When he went off to school, he discovered coding. And the timeline makes me laugh now, because he spent years telling me to learn it. This was before the pandemic, 2018, 2019. “Bro, you’d enjoy it so much.” He knew me. He knew I loved problem solving, puzzles, brain teasers, that I was exceptional at maths. He’d already connected the dots I refused to connect.
I wasn’t interested at the time. I didn’t see the need. It took me four years to realise I actually needed to learn it, because I was passionate about tech. In 2021, my first year in Finland, I finally took his advice. I gave Python a couple of dedicated weeks. Then I stopped.
What I wanted instead was simpler: I had seen an app I loved, I had an idea, and I wanted somebody to build it for me. So every time I saw him: “Bro, let’s build an app. You can code. I have the idea.” And every single time, in different ways, he said no. He told me it’s a really dedicated project, not something you do casually, that I should probably learn to code myself.
Fair to him. He was completely right. I didn’t know back then that to make an app you need six months of doing nothing but building. I was just excited, full of passion, with money in my hands and an idea I couldn’t put down.
So when I finally got serious, I changed the question. I stopped saying “build it with me” and said: “I know you’re busy. Recommend me to someone who will.”
He recommended me to his friend. Who recommended me to his friend.
You already know what the friend of a friend of a friend did. But understand why my guards were down: a referral from him wasn’t a stranger. The friend of my friend is like a brother to me. That’s how I was raised to see it. That’s why it was easy for me to overpay when the developer asked for more money. I wasn’t doing due diligence on a contractor. I was welcoming somebody’s brother.
The message that broke something
The short version of the collapse, since Part 1 has the long one: I paid the developer everything. He contracted a backend guy. The backend guy took the money and stopped responding. Deadlines passed, one after another.
My friend stepped in once. He told me not to worry, his own direct friend was joining forces now, and this guy was so good the app would be ready in two weeks maximum. I trusted him completely. Two weeks came and went. Then more weeks. They went by so fast. Weeks felt like days. That speed was the depressing part, time evaporating while nothing happened.
So I sent my friend a message on WhatsApp. Four weeks gone at this point, maybe more. I wasn’t asking him to code. I wasn’t even angry. People around me were saying “it’s Nigeria, take it to the police,” and I didn’t want that. I wanted to talk. I asked him: bro, please, let’s have a meeting. All four of us, one conversation. I just want to know what’s going on with my app.
He said No.
Because he didn’t want to push them. Or hurry them. He didn’t want to be so involved that it felt like pressure on them.
I read that on my phone and it went deep. And I typed back: “Yeah, okay, that’s fine.”
Deep down it was not fine.
There was a message I composed in my head and never sent. It went something like: it feels like you have too much respect for them and too little for me. My money is on the line. My time is on the line. Every hour I’ve put into this thing is on the line. And you’re worried about how they would feel if you leaned on them. You’re protecting their comfort while I’m the one at a loss. I took your referral like a brother’s word. I opened my arms, dropped my guard, overpaid, because you vouched. And now that it’s burning, you don’t want to look pushy.
I never sent it. I never made an issue of it. I just continued living, understanding that it was my problem anyway, and mine to face head-on.
The morning I can’t give you in detail
The night before I was supposed to show the app to my boss, I asked the developer: bro, what’s up? By tomorrow, he promised. I woke up, messaged him, and got an apology text instead. The backend didn’t work. Blah, blah, blah.
I can’t walk you through that morning frame by frame. I’ve tried. I don’t remember it well. That’s what that season did to me. What I do remember is what stopped: I had been taking courses, preparing to do this properly. I was literally studying The Mom Test, learning how to interview customers, for an app that did not exist. After that morning I stopped the courses. I stopped all of it. I spiraled downwards and let the whole thing go.
The silence
We never talked about it. Not once, from that day to this one.
I didn’t bring it up. I’d said “that’s fine” and I stood by it. But he never brought it up either. He knew what I was going through, and it never came up again. That’s its own kind of sad.
And still: we’re on good terms. Genuinely. The five of us have our group chat, two of us abroad now, three still in Nigeria, and the vibes are good. The wound was never resolved. We just never opened it again, and the friendship carried on around it.
(One more thing, because it just happened: the developer saw Part 1 of this series on LinkedIn. After months of silence he came back to my DMs, talking like he cared. I told him straight: bro, don’t act like you care about me right now, because you don’t. It’s nothing personal. I’ve moved on. Please move on.)
The turn
So after all of that. The referral that burned me, the meeting he wouldn’t sit in, the silence we both keep. If he called me tomorrow and said “I have a startup idea, build it with me”?
I’d be there. One hundred percent, all in, before he finished the sentence.
Because I know exactly what working with him would feel like. We’ve been doing stuff together since we were thirteen. And all of this, everything in this essay, is just by the way. It doesn’t touch my friends. It never did. I still text him now: bro, let’s do something together. He still gives me his polite, soft no. “It’s not ready.” “Not right now.” Even after everything, I’m the one still asking.
The door is flung wide open.
Next in the series: the second startup. The one I packed up with my own hands and never ran again.
I’m documenting this whole comeback in public — every number, including the embarrassing ones, updated hourly by a script that can’t flatter me: oroomi.github.io/open-books
If you want to watch whether it works, subscribe. Fair warning: I might fail again. That’s sort of the point.