Fear of Failing Publicly 2: The OLOVA Music App

This is part 2 in a series about my institutionalized fear of failing publicly. I am using the series to share the businesses and opportunities taken and dropped, failed and succeeded. I am sharing these because failure is not something we should be ashamed of even if society ridicules those who try and fail. You are not the first to fail. You can Read Part 1 here. This is quite a long story so it will be split into two parts. Try to read part 3 when you get a chance.

In part one, I mentioned the high school I went to and how I feel it affected my outlook on trying and possibly continues to affect me as I aim to achieve my goals. Quite recently I recently realised that every once in a while I get hit by a bout of the Imposter syndrome. I’ll steal a definition off wikipedia and drop it below to help you understand what exactly the imposter syndrome is. I’ll also repost my first paragraph from part one in case you haven’t gotten a chance to read it.

Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”

The School I went to: Failing wasn’t an option because that was the stuff legends were made of. Nicknames that lasted an entire 6 years were built on small failures, slips of the tongue and literal slips. As a result, we didnt’t try much. The comfort zone was home and we loved it there. After all, why try if you may fail? If you decided to be a daring and different student all eyes would be on you. If you decided to TRY all eyes would be on you. Not to support you, but to watch you fail and to ask you why you even tried. When you succeeded we only acknowledged after years…when we were sure you had succeeded. I have seen this affect me in a few ways over the years.

Accidently Falling into Innovation

The second business venture I attempted was close to a year after graduation. I recently found the company documents while I was cleaning up and the memories came flooding back. It was quite an adventure! To give you some background about how we landed in this venture I’ll share a little about myself. I grew up a huge fan of music, by the third year of high school I had fooled enough people into thinking I could sing and had become part of a couple of singing groups at our very musical mission school . I loved that part of my life, creating music, performing music and I did it with very talented friends. One such group continued past high school, we recorded a few songs that we sometimes play when we’re excited and we made it to the finals of the Book Cafe Exposure Competition in 2009 (I think). That year’s competition was then won by Mukoomba who over the years would then become a household name in Zimbabwean music, touring the world and have shown that musical success isn’t tied to the popular vernacular languages. Could have been us, but this post isn’t about that.

Soon we had to put music on hold and go to college, grow up and chase more realistic goals. This we did.

This story revolves around four friends trying to solve a problem that started as just our own. There was Onai (the talkative debater from part one, also a great rapper), Brad (generally quiet, high potentialite music producer who also tried his hand at rap and at the time…developer in training), Simba (known more as Preach back then, amazing rapper, witty and your all around good guy) and Me, the resident genius.

The Catalyst
Simba had written an amazing album, which he wanted to release differently. He had completed it and felt it was too good to do the then standard social media launch with a free link to soundcloud. We listened to it and we agreed, but at the same time there wasn’t a budget to do something crazy. To be honest there wasn’t even a budget to do anything. We felt this album couldn’t go out for free and that was the difficult piece to fix. We set out on guerilla marketing campaign, to get people interested in the OLO album. So we tried to find a way to get people interested in what OLO was. We played around with different things, from children’s chips to condoms! We had more than 100 people using the hashtag #OLO and it was helping.

A few images that went online:

We then started thinking about how we would give this album to the world. A website was one of the thoughts. Even though we got asked this a lot of times, I’m not really sure if it was Onai, Brad or Preach…but one of them suggested an app. A mobile application for the launch of the OLO album. Our lives would change at that point

The App

The idea was simple. We would develop a mobile application that would house the album. You would download it, pay for the album on ecocash and we would send you a ket to give access. Brad started working on it. It was ugly but it was functional and it was lovely. It was so interesting watching the ideas come to life.

One day while we sat and discussed how to make the app better we realised that the problems we had seen for the OLO album were not isolated to just Preach. A lot of amazing music was coming out Zimbabwe at the time. The youth were in a buzz! Hip Hop and RnB were making a mark on radio and finally started dominating the airwaves. It was then that we knew we couldn’t be selfish with the OLO app (that’s we called it at this point). We decided we would make this an app for everone.

The Olova App

The app became the OLOVA app. Keeping the OLO that we had built interest in, we made it OLOVA. I learnt a great deal in product development after this, contract development became a thing as we set up to talk to the music industry in Zim. The next few months were intense.

We would go through so many versions of the Olova app. From a version of the app that looked like it had been made by Oracle for corporate receipting to the final product. We had to take an interest in apps, music and otherwise to improve the app. While we all put in a lot of effort, Brad put in a lot of work since he was the only developer. The coding (though it was obviously challenging at times) isn’t what I admire most about 2013/14 Brad. I admire how we would give him ideas and he would come back a couple of days with a finished product or work in progress. From i-don’t-know-how-to-do-that to actually giving it to us.

Artist engagement. We held so many coffee dates with well known and unknown artists in that time. We mainly used a small coffee shop called Gaby’s situated in the avenues of Harare at Travel Plaza. The coffee was affordable and Onai and I lived within walking distance. We still lived at home with our parents and Onai was the only formally employed person in the group of four (bless him). In 90% of those coffee meetings we would pray that the artist doesn’t order anything more than coffee. It was in the dingy café that we would meet Sir Nige (the founder of 263 Chat) and hear his still fresh story of accountant to hashtag to business.

The only meeting we didn’t have at Gaby’s was with Kuda Musasiwa (serial entrepreneur, rapper and producer) now more popular for the Fresh in a box brand that delivers vegie – boxes to your doorstep. I remember that meeting clearly, held at Sopranos in Avondale and Kuda paid for the coffee. He also told us point blank the app was ugly but the idea was noble.

We sold our dream and Olova like our lives dependant on it. We really believed it would change lives for Zimbabwean artists and consumers alike. We were aiming for a culture shift more than anything else. Musicians who had been our idols when we chased music sat across from us and bought into our dream and into our culture change theory. Soon we had met hundreds of artists and thousands of songs had been committed to OLOVA when it became ready. The train was moving!

The music app that would have it’s own currency. We called the oLos (yeah, don’t judge). We fought hard daily, walked to all the places we had to go and made a huge effort to meet all the artists we could. We spoke to existing labels and a few stables were created just to have music on Olova. We uploaded songs one at a time (yup dumb) for all our artists, uploaded the album artwork separately as well. It was a job and half.

We started feeling like we needed interns and yet we were barely interns ourselves. The courage to stand up for something you believe in is a great feeling. The lengths one is willing to go for something they are passionate about is amazing. We slaved for Olova and we could vouch for it. If you are doing something now and you find yourself lacking the energy to push or try harder, maybe it’s not the right thing.

The story of Olova is one I could tell over and over again. For now, you can just read part 3 of the Fear of Failing series to see how it went. #kaizenYOU