€2,000 and Nineteen Months of "Almost." My Rival Vibe-Coded the Same App.
Fables of a Failed Founder
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€2,000 and Nineteen Months of "Almost." My Rival Vibe-Coded the Same App.<br>Two months, we agreed. The morning I had to demo it to my boss, my developer told me it didn't exist.
Omisakin Oromidayo<br>Jul 20, 2026
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So I had this idea for an app.<br>A couple of years ago I was talking about it with a friend. We worked in the kind of company where you do hourly shifts — you go in, do your hours, simple stuff. And every week they send everybody a spreadsheet. Everybody’s schedule on one sheet, so many names, and the text is so small you have to trace your name across the row and check each day just to know when you’re working. Very small, very annoying, hard to pinpoint your days. But it’s not impossible. It works, actually.<br>Thanks for reading Fables of a Failed Founder! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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The founder in me couldn’t leave that alone though. I’ve dreamt of building an app — not “having a business,” building an app — for as long as I can remember. And here was one sitting inside my own job. Build it for work, make some money off it. That was the whole plan.<br>I couldn’t code back then. So I went to a good friend of mine who’s a programmer — junior at Goldman Sachs, the same guy who’d been telling me for years I should learn to code myself. I said bro, I want to build an app. And he didn’t say “let’s build it.” He gave me a number.<br>And the guy he was introducing me to was not somebody he knew directly. It was a friend of a friend. So my friend introduced me to his friend, who introduced me to this developer. That was when I first got suspicious, honestly — because this was no longer somebody I know, or even somebody known by somebody I know. It was “trust me, my guy can get it done,” passed down a chain, and every link in the chain said the same thing.<br>I ignored the feeling. Noted.<br>We spoke for the first time in December 2024. I paid for the first time in January 2025. I’m Nigerian — based here in Turku, Finland, but Nigerian — so I contacted Nigerians to build it, based in Nigeria. About €2,000 for the whole thing: design, front end, back end, everything. Two months of work. That was the agreement. And if it grew into a real startup after that, then we talk employment, monthly pay, all of it.<br>I was so excited. I’m finally building an app. It’s happening.<br>Then it got weird. I went to tell my boss at work — and he goes, “Is it the same app this other guy is building?”<br>What other guy?<br>Apparently a colleague of mine — the same friend I’d originally talked ideas with, before we had a falling out over something else entirely — had also thought deeply about that spreadsheet after our one conversation, and he was also building the app. Both of us. Separately. Secretly. Same app. Real life actually does this.<br>But here was the difference: he was vibe-coding his version himself. Me, I had spent €2,000 on professionals. So I thought — of course I’m going to win this. Mine will be quality grade. He’s just prompting an AI.<br>Now there was a race, though. I went back to my developer and said the story has changed, there’s a competitor, my boss is warm to this — he wants to see it, touch it, experience it — I cannot deliver late anymore. I need it earlier than we said. He said okay, no problem. That’s just going to cost more money.<br>I don’t even remember the exact math anymore. What I know is that everything I ever paid came to about €2,000, and part of it was me paying extra to get my own app on time.<br>The designs got done. I showed my boss. He said they’re great — but designs don’t mean much, he wants to touch the actual app. Fair. So I asked my developer: when will it be ready? He gave me a date. And I did the thing I want you to notice, because this is where it actually went wrong: I took his date and made it my promise. I booked the meeting with my boss for that day.<br>Then the countdown. If you’ve been here, you know this rhythm already.<br>A week before: bro, is it ready? — No, not ready, but almost done, just finalizing a few things.<br>The weekend: bro? — By Monday everything’s going to be ready.<br>Monday: — You know how it is, there’s no electricity in Nigeria, that’s why it’s slow. But before your meeting, it’ll be ready.<br>And I kept believing him. Every single round. I kept believing all these stories.<br>The morning of the meeting I asked one last time. I need to touch my app before my boss touches it. And that’s when he confessed: the app was not ready. The guy doing the back end wasn’t even responding to him anymore.<br>The whole thing shattered me.<br>I walked into that meeting with nothing. And this is the part nobody tells you about being a founder — you have to look into people’s eyes and say: this thing I promised you, that I said I was going to show you — I’m sorry, I cannot show you. My boss was warm to it. He wanted to experience it. And I stood there with...