The hardest part wasn’t building the app.
It was deciding what to let go of.
(Building BE in Public: Day 2)
BE didn’t start as BE.
Two years ago, it started as The Snatched App: a platform to connect clients with beauty professionals.
That version didn’t fail. It worked.
It won a prize and placed in the Top 10 of the Orange Social Venture Prize Botswana 2023 (ps, Orange Botswana is one of Botswana’s leading mobile service providers.)
But even with that validation, something felt off.
The idea evolved into beautyapp.io , still connection-based, with an added education layer for beauty enthusiasts.
On paper, it made sense.
In practice, it was too broad.
What finally shifted everything was this question:
What problem do I care enough about to solve deeply FOR YEARS, not just for launch?
The answer was always there = my hair.
4C hair.
Length retention.
The gap between scattered advice and structured learning.
So I pivoted again.
This time, fully.
BE became a hair education platform, focused entirely on research-based length retention for 4C hair ✅
❌ no marketplaces,
❌no distractions,
❌no dilution.
From a building standpoint, the shift mattered too.
• FlutterFlow helped me bring the early versions of each idea to life .Fast enough to test, pivot, and learn.😊
• Dreamflow took it further. In under an hour, I had the first draft of BE mapped out.🥳
• Now I’m refining the UI/UX (shoutout to Mobbin , a Buildathon partner, for the design inspiration).💖
• Connecting everything to Firebase .🫧
• Making it smarter with OpenAI .🎓
• And getting it ready for the App Store and Play Store.📲
The build feels different when the idea is clear.
Takeaway:
Sometimes progress isn’t about adding more.
It’s about choosing one thing and building it properly.
If you’ve ever pivoted, scrapped a “good” idea for the right one, or rebuilt something from clarity instead of pressure. I’d love to hear your story.
