From My First Date to My First Startup

My first and second years at university were largely defined by solitude. I kept to myself, moved through school quietly, and rarely allowed people into my world.

Then, in my third year, something changed.

I became very close to someone who would eventually become my best friend. What started through a mutual acquaintance grew into one of those rare friendships where conversation never seemed to run dry. We could talk for hours about life, ambition, business, our future, and almost anything else without feeling like we were repeating ourselves.

We just had a natural rhythm.

One thing she could not understand, however, was how I had reached my third year at university without ever being in a serious relationship.

She decided that had to change.

Her solution was simple: find someone I genuinely liked, and she would sponsor my first proper date.

At the time, that sounded like an excellent deal.

After a few weeks, I eventually found someone I was interested in. We spoke, things seemed promising, and I asked her out. I hoped we could meet that coming weekend, but she wasn't available. She suggested the following weekend instead.

That delay ended up changing my life.

For the next two nights, I struggled to sleep.

Not because I was nervous about the date, but because another idea kept competing for my attention.

For some time, I had been experimenting with WordPress.com and basic HTML. I desperately wanted to launch my own website, but I didn't want the free WordPress subdomain. I wanted a proper domain name, my own hosting, and something that felt like it truly belonged to me.

There was only one problem.

I could barely stretch my monthly feeding allowance through the month. Paying for a domain and hosting felt like a luxury I simply couldn't afford.

Now, suddenly, there was money available for something else.

I had a choice.

I could finally go on the date I had been looking forward to, or I could use the money to start building something I had been thinking about for years.

To understand why that decision mattered so much to me, you have to understand what fascinated me growing up.

I spent many evenings watching News at 10 on Channels Television and following Nigerian politics. I was interested in public debate, journalism, politics, influence and the power of information.

Over time, I started imagining a platform where people could speak openly, debate ideas, challenge narratives, and share information without falsehoods and misinformation overwhelming the conversation.

At that point, it was just an idea.

And realistically, I could have postponed it.

I could have told myself that I would build it after graduation. Or after I got my first job. Or when I had more money.

There would always have been a reasonable excuse to wait.

Meanwhile, there was a girl I liked and a date already waiting for me.

For someone in my situation at the time, the decision wasn't as obvious as it might sound today.

But eventually, I chose the website.

I told my best friend that instead of spending the money on the date, I wanted to use it to start my first online venture.

As you can probably imagine, she wasn't exactly thrilled.

This entire plan had started because she wanted me to finally experience dating, and I had somehow managed to turn her intervention into startup capital.

Still, because she cared about me, she eventually gave me her blessing.

Then she asked a question that created another problem:

"What are you going to call it?"

I told her to give me a few days.

Finding the name

I have always been drawn to building things around the environment I come from rather than trying to make everything sound foreign or universally acceptable from the beginning.

I considered myself deeply Pan-African in outlook.

I had spent nights reading about people such as Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chief MKO Abiola. Beyond politics, I was fascinated by how many influential Nigerian leaders understood the power of media, publishing and public opinion.

Azikiwe built newspapers.

Awolowo understood the importance of the press.

Abiola owned one of Nigeria's most influential media organisations.

There was something about that relationship between media, ideas and society that fascinated me.

I wanted to build something along that path, but for a new generation.

Then I started thinking about Nigerian culture itself.

Nigeria runs on conversations.

Stories travel quickly. People discuss politics, entertainment, relationships, business, celebrities, neighbourhood events and almost everything in between.

We call it gist.

And when someone always seems to know what is happening, Nigerians have another popular word for it:

Amebo.

I started experimenting with different combinations.

Big.

Naija.

Gist.

Amebo.

After several attempts, one name finally stuck:

BigNaijaGist.

It wasn't the most sophisticated name in the world.

But it was ours.

It sounded Nigerian.

And more importantly, it represented what I imagined the platform could become: a big place for conversations about Nigeria and eventually beyond Nigeria.

I registered the domain and bought a hosting plan from Whogohost.

I even bought a new backpack so I could carry my sister's laptop around the school campus more easily.

I was ridiculously excited.

Apparently, I was so visibly happy that some of my hallmates assumed the date had gone extremely well and that I had finally entered a relationship.

Technically, I had.

Just not with a person.

I had fallen in love with building something.

Then reality hit

There was one rather significant problem.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I didn't know how to code.

I didn't understand hosting properly.

I didn't know how to point a domain name to a server.

Terms that sound completely normal to me today felt like another language at the time.

Every small problem became an obstacle.

So I started searching.

YouTube became my classroom.

If something broke, I searched for how to fix it.

If I didn't understand a concept, I watched another video.

If that video confused me, I watched five more.

Before then, I had already spent years sitting in front of computers playing video games for hours.

Now I had discovered something else capable of keeping me in front of a screen for even longer.

Programming.

I would sit in front of that laptop trying to solve one problem after another, sometimes for hours without realising how much time had passed.

What started as a desire to launch a blog slowly turned into curiosity about how websites actually worked.

That curiosity became learning.

Learning became building.

And building eventually became a career.

At the time, I had no idea that choosing a domain name over a first date would become one of the decisions that pushed me toward becoming a software engineer despite my background in Economics and Accounting.

Looking back, BigNaijaGist wasn't simply my first startup.

It was one of my first programming teachers.

Years later, the idea never really left

BigNaijaGist went through different phases, and life eventually took me in many other directions.

But the original idea never completely disappeared.

If anything, the problem that inspired it has become even bigger.

Social media has given billions of people a voice, but it has also created an environment where anonymity, misinformation, fake accusations, bots, burner accounts and coordinated toxicity can spread at enormous speed.

One false accusation can damage someone's reputation before the truth has even had time to put on its shoes.

One anonymous account can repeatedly harass people with almost no consequences.

Bots can manipulate conversations.

Fake accounts can manufacture popularity.

And misinformation can sometimes travel further than the correction.

I don't think the solution is to simply tell people:

"If social media affects you, leave social media."

Because the reality is that the world has changed.

Visibility is becoming a form of currency.

Careers are built online.

Businesses are discovered online.

Ideas spread online.

Opportunities are created online.

Communities are increasingly formed online.

For many people, withdrawing completely from the digital world can also mean withdrawing from opportunities.

So perhaps the question shouldn't be whether people are mentally strong enough to survive toxic platforms.

Perhaps we should also ask:

Can we build better platforms?

Rebuilding my first love

That question is why I am rebuilding BigNaijaGist.

But this time, I'm not building it simply as a Nigerian blogging platform.

The ambition is much larger.

I want BigNaijaGist to become a global social platform built around identity, authenticity, reputation and accountability, while carrying something I value deeply from Nigerian culture: respect for the person on the other side of the conversation.

The platform is being designed to make it significantly harder for bots, burner accounts and fake identities to dominate conversations.

Real people should have reputations.

How you behave should matter.

How credible your contributions are should matter.

How consistently you contribute value should matter.

Your reputation should not simply be measured by how many followers you have or how loudly you can provoke people.

And people who consistently create healthy, valuable conversations should be recognised for it.

My long-term ambition is to build toward a platform where toxicity represents less than 1% of interactions.

That is an ambitious target.

I know.

But I would rather build toward an uncomfortable goal than accept that online spaces must inevitably become hostile simply because that is what we have become accustomed to.

The internet doesn't have to reward the worst version of us.

The date I never went on

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if that first date had happened the weekend I originally planned.

Maybe nothing would have changed.

Maybe I would still have eventually learned programming.

Maybe BigNaijaGist would have appeared years later in another form.

There is no way to know.

What I do know is that one small decision created a chain reaction I could never have predicted.

I traded my first date for a domain name.

The domain became a website.

The website forced me to learn.

Learning turned into programming.

Programming became a career.

And years later, I find myself returning to the same idea that started everything.

Only now, I actually know how to build it.

BigNaijaGist was my first startup.

It was also, in many ways, my first love.

And now I'm giving it another chance.

If you believe social media can be both open and accountable, and you would like to be among the first people to experience what we're building, you can join the BigNaijaGist early-access list with your first name, last name, and email address.

Join the early-access list here.

Our first group of users will be invited before December 1, 2026.

Maybe years from now, I'll look back at that first group of users the same way I look back at that first domain name today:

as the beginning of something much bigger.