Why I started Very Serious Company

I’ve spent the last few years building software for other people’s businesses, working as an engineer on teams across several industries. My own projects have always had to fit around that work.

I started Very Serious Company to give those projects a shared home, and to build a business around the ones people find useful.

Right now that means two products. Tippy helps creators receive support from their audience. Further is an AI-powered workspace that helps students find and apply to postgraduate opportunities. They serve different people and have different questions to answer, so I want each one to have an identity that makes sense for its audience, with VSC as the company behind them.

I enjoy making things. I care about how an interface feels, how a product works, and the small details that make it easier to use. But knowing how to build isn’t enough. I also want to get better at what happens around the building: finding the people who need a product, understanding why they use it, and figuring out how it can sustain itself.

I’m building from Lagos, and that shapes the questions I ask. Can someone pay with a method that’s available to them? Is the price realistic for the people it’s meant for? Does the product fit how they actually do things? I want those questions guiding what I build from the start, not patched in later.

There’s also a personal reason. I want a business I can keep working on for years, with more say over how I spend my time. I’m still figuring out what that looks like in practice.

As for the name, it’s a little tongue-in-cheek.

I’ll use this space to share decisions, experiments, launches, and anything else worth writing about. I’m also starting Very Serious Dude on YouTube to document more of the process. A finished product tells you very little about how it got there, and I’d like to share some of that missing context.

It’s early. There are ideas to test and customers to find. For now, I want to get useful products into people’s hands and learn enough to make them better.