Lessons from Building Tayozola

We started Tayozola in 2021 with a rough idea and a domain name. Building it has given us a much longer list of things we wish we had known at the beginning.

This is our attempt to write it down honestly.

What we got right

The manual review process was the right call. It is slow and it will not scale forever, but conversations with applicants changed the product more than any planning document did.

The four-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.

Some of our least efficient choices turned out to be useful. Manual review gave us context that automation would have hidden.

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

We were surprised by how often applicants mentioned the name. Tayozola is not an obvious name for a technology company, but that made people curious enough to look it up and start a conversation.

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.

What we carry forward

The plan remains modest: improve the dashboard, keep growth close to the support capacity we actually have, and keep talking to the people using the Network.

There is always more to fix. The useful work is knowing what matters, being honest about what is unfinished, and following through.