Building in Public: Year One
What we learned in our first year. What worked, what didn't, and where we're headed from here.
A year ago we started building Tayozola with a rough idea, a domain name, and more questions than answers. Twelve months later, the product is live, we have real members using it, and we've learned more than we expected — about infrastructure, about users, and about ourselves as a team.
This is our attempt to write it down honestly.
What we got right
The manual review process was the right call. We debated it a lot — it's slow, it doesn't scale, and every startup orthodoxy says to automate your onboarding as quickly as possible. But the conversations we've had with applicants have shaped the product more than anything else. When you talk to the people you're building for, you build the right things.
The three-domain structure also held up well. It forced clarity. When someone asks "is this a network product or a community initiative?" the answer is: it depends which domain you're on. That structure creates focus instead of forcing everything to compete for attention on a single page.
The things we were most uncertain about turned out to be the things we most needed to do. Slow onboarding. Manual review. A name that doesn't explain itself. All of it was right.
What we got wrong
We underestimated how long infrastructure work takes. Every estimate we made in the first six months was off — not because we were bad at planning, but because infrastructure has a way of surfacing edge cases you didn't know existed. We're better at estimating now, but we're still not good at it.
We also shipped the dashboard before it was ready. Not by a lot, but enough that early members saw a version of the product that didn't reflect what we were capable of. That stung. We've been rebuilding trust through follow-up, responsiveness, and a steady stream of improvements since then.
What surprised us
The most surprising thing was how much the name mattered. Tayozola is not an obvious name for a tech company. But consistently, the people who applied mentioned the name as the reason they looked us up in the first place. It creates curiosity. Curiosity creates conversations. Conversations create members.
We also didn't expect how much the journal would matter. Writing forces clarity. When you have to explain something in plain language, you find out quickly whether you actually understand it yourself.
Year two
We're going into year two with a clearer product, a stronger foundation, and a better understanding of who we're building for. The beta will open up slightly — still gated, still reviewed, but to a wider circle. The dashboard will get better. The writing will continue.
We're still early. But we're pointed in the right direction, and we're moving.