Yeah, Okay, That's Fine. - by Omisakin Oromidayo
Fables of a Failed Founder
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Yeah, Okay, That's Fine.
Omisakin Oromidayo<br>Jul 27, 2026
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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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.”<br>He recommended me to his friend. Who recommended me to his friend.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>He said No.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>I never sent it. I never made an issue of it. I just continued living, understanding that it was my problem anyway, and mine...