A viral tweet is not a business plan

When the Black Lives Matter movement was in full swing, someone made a tweet along those lines: "Hey, let's help black businesses get online" (paraphrased). This just resonated with me. Well, not just with me, but more than 100,000 people decided to like and retweet it.

Before long, I reached out to the guy who made the tweet and said, "Hey, let's get it done." I listed my skills as a developer and offered to help. He copied and pasted a message saying that he had received more messages than he could handle, but would take the time to reply as soon as possible.

Kristian was tired of the discussion happening online about black people, in the wake of the death of George Floyd. It all revolved around changing profile pics, making performative art, and nothing of substance. The world was almost moving on from the situation, satisfied with their own performance, ignoring the plight black people face everyday. When Kristian made his tweet, he didn’t just type it. It burst out of his chest. It came out in all CAPS. He wanted change. He did get back to me eventually, and I joined a Slack channel with hundreds of people. That first Zoom call we had was emotional. Everyone wanted to help and was ready to do it at no expense. We all had one thing in common: a passion for helping put black people online. Kristian was elected CEO of this enterprise.

There is almost a universal belief in the tech world that, in order to find the right person, they have to be like-minded, have the same hobbies, or something similar. I often talk to people who say in interviews that "I just want to work with someone I can have a beer with." I nod, without ever telling them I don't drink. In dating apps, we try to match people based on their interests. It sounds reasonable. But the reality is more nuanced than that. Over the course of 6 months, that reality settled in.

In this group, we had the same common goal. But when it came to doing the work, everyone had a very different idea of how we were to do it. As a software engineer with a failed startup under my belt, I proposed a platform like Amazon where businesses could post their inventory. You could argue that they can already do that with Amazon, but the selling point for my idea was that we would provide a blueprint and even walk them through every step to get up and running. We would do the things that don't scale, so to speak. My idea was accepted.

The next day, a member of the group brought up my idea and said we shouldn't do it. She said we shouldn't focus on selling stuff. I tried to clarify that we wouldn't actually sell anything, but before I could argue my point across, she left the group.

We had several other meetings to refine the idea, and we decided on a business name, a domain name, and where we were going to build the platform. I gathered the list of technical people in the group so we could discuss the stack and tools. To my surprise, someone from the marketing team decided to join.

She requested to be part of every meeting so we wouldn't steer away from our core message. I didn't think much of it—I figured she would quickly get bored of tech talk and give up eventually. But she persisted. She called me out for not giving her a GitHub account. She criticized the landing page and suggested we use Hubspot, as she uses with her employer. I was using mailchimp and paying out of pocket. I wasn’t ready to shell out hundreds of dollars a month just for email.

In the general meeting with the whole team, two important questions were asked: 1. How much is everyone willing to invest in this business? and 2. How are we going to make money in the long term?

The girl from marketing raised her hand. "1. I am an intern at so-and-so. I don't have any money. But I can give you $100. 2. This is a non-profit. If we make a single dollar, I'm leaving immediately." She was indeed an unpaid intern for a non-profit in the UK.

It's very possible that the next person who answered didn't hear what she said and just continued on with the conversation. A lot of ideas for making money were discussed in the call, but no one addressed how much they were willing to invest. After the call, I got a message telling me: "I reluctantly said $100. I thought we were all volunteers here. Don't you think it's too much?" Before I could answer, she continued: "I really don't want this to turn into a capitalistic business squashing minorities."

"Hey, one of the reasons we are asking for this investment is because it costs money to run things. Even the few little services we signed up for to host the website and tools for the developers already cost more than $100 a month," I answered.

"Really? Are we already in debt? Who is paying for this?" she asked.

"I'm paying for it for now."

"Oh, okay," she replied. She never came back.

In a tech meeting, while we were discussing the merits of building an app versus just having a website, a guy raised his hand, turned on his camera, and said: “I can build the entire app, free of charge, that’s what I do for a living.” Who was going to debate "free"? But what really stood out was that this was a white guy. The only white guy in the group. Immediately, DMs started flaring up: "When did this white guy join?"

This group was never about being black-only; it was about bringing black businesses up. I thanked him and welcomed him aboard. Before long, Mr. O'Donnell was added to GitHub and started his work. We had a blueprint. We knew what we were building, and it was only a matter of time and dedication to bring it to life. But someone in the team decided to peek at Mr. O’Donnell’s life, and found something worth bringing up.

Kristian asked me to join a call where he had invited a couple other people and Mr. O’Donnell.

"It has come to our attention that you have a problematic Twitter account, Mr. O'Donnell. We give you two options: 1. Delete everything from your Twitter account, make a public apology, and we can work together," the CEO said. I was shocked, but I could only imagine what option 2 would be.

"2. You still delete everything from your Twitter account, make a public apology, and you can go on your way."

I quickly switched tabs to Twitter and looked for Mr. O'Donnell. We only had one white guy in the group, and it had to be the one that went through an N-word tirade. He had decided to use the word in every way possible over the course of years. He did delete all his tweets and made a vague apology about his checkered past, saying that he had learned a lot from it. But it wasn't the same anymore. We didn’t get that free app after all. After his initial commit of boiler plate code, Mr. O’Donnell was never heard from again.

While all this was happening, I was gainfully employed, dividing my attention between work, family, and this new venture. I had dedicated $400 a month to this effort. I’ve posted every bill we got over our #Expenses channel. The whole idea of profit came up again: How are we going to make money? This is where I made a mistake. I betrayed the group and used the forbidden word. I said: "We can bring in outside investors." The call went quiet—for a moment I thought my wifi was acting up. "Okay," one of the leaders said. It didn't take long before I was invited to a meeting.

"It has come to our attention that... you don't have enough time to dedicate to this effort," the CEO said.

I laughed. "We don't want you to leave; we just prefer if you stick to the tech." I wasn't fired; instead, I was dropped from the leadership group. That was fine by me, but when they decided on how much money we should invest in the company, I raised some questions.

"I understand we all pitch what we can. Some of you are going to invest 100 or 200 dollars for a share of the company. But I've paid over a thousand dollars for our Slack account, website, domain, etc. Should this be included in my ongoing investment?"

This came as a shock to everyone. They may have had a common goal of helping raise black businesses' profiles, but what they didn't know was that it costs money. People dropped out of the group one by one. Before the year was over, it was just me and the CEO on the call. I told him I'd leave the website up in case it generated some interest. It never did.

It's easy to believe that like-minded people can work together. It makes sense. But the reality is different. It takes more than that to run a company or to form a relationship. Come to think of it, the reason for my most successful relationships was mostly due to proximity. In fact, most of the people I get along with have little in common with me. I have friends who love surfing, I don't know the first thing about it. I have friends that love anime, to me they are just cartoons. I have friends who like to have beer with me, I don't drink. We get along just fine.

To build a business, it takes more than just having a passion. It takes experience and skills. By no means was I a skilled businessman, but I had some experience. The "CEO" of this effort was just someone with a tweet that went viral. He played guitar in his dingy apartment in New York. Cool guy, great guy to hang out with, but he was no CEO.

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