The May Prototype

One and a half months into development of the Gosabi Project and we had made a few significant advances.

Firstly, we were incubated in Cameroon’s only collaboration suite, ActivSpaces. Our office was perched on the slopes of Mt. Cameroon; local media had actually dubbed the place “Silicon Mountain”. It was the perfect place for lofty ideas and grand ambition. There was a vibrant and supportive energy there that kept us working round the clock. This was a privilege that would be remembered for a lifetime.

Secondly, we had developed a prototype. A large part of this month had gone into testing and tweaks. As the rookies that we were, we had used the most basic development tools. However, we had used them to satisfaction. The prototype was almost ready for launching.

We set our sights on June, when we would let the dice be cast -- and cross the Rubicon.

The April Genesis

Development of the Gosabi Project commenced in mid-April, 2011 after a lot of naysaying and criticism. "There are giants in the search market", "Africans don't even have content online", "Make sure your code works before you start dreaming" and "I'm going to leave you alone now" were the comments that met most talk about an African premium-content search engine.

Simply put, we just wanted a search utility where you could be looking for something in an area near you and actually find it without having to filter through a whole lot of cybernetic dross. This was something that almost no search engine could provide for you. More importantly, it seemed that the things we were looking for perhaps weren't even online... yet. So we set to work with the unique objective of building this solution.

This is our story.