In May 2025, I officially launched Foundry One Group—an integrated venture portfolio company designed to build digital ventures from the ground up. The vision was comprehensive: handle everything from initial idea through development, marketing, and fundraising, all under one roof.
The past four months have been a masterclass in humility. Coming from a corporate background where I focused primarily on product design and development, I quickly discovered how many critical skills and areas of expertise I’d never had to navigate before. Building products within an established company structure is vastly different from creating an entire ecosystem to build ventures from scratch. There are so many moving parts I hadn’t anticipated, skills I needed to develop, and team members I had to find to ensure the success of what we’re building.
Let me break down the key areas where I’ve learned the most—and sometimes learned the hard way.
Building a Team: Harder Than Dating
Even before establishing the group, one thing became crystal clear: I couldn’t do this alone. As a designer with a technical background who’s managed product teams, I had solid skills in certain areas. But product success requires so much more—design, development, marketing, and business strategy are just the beginning.
To create a team capable of building truly great products, I needed to think bigger. This is why I established Foundry One Agency as our internal team of experts, designed not just to create the products in our portfolio, but to transform them into well-established brands.
Building a team turned out to be harder than I ever imagined. The process is genuinely like dating all over again: you meet people, assess whether they have the right skills, determine if they’re a cultural fit, gauge their interest in your offer, and—perhaps most importantly—figure out if they’ll actually deliver on what they promise in the short term.
I now completely understand why so many companies outsource their work to agencies and specialized teams. Building your own talent pool is incredibly challenging, and ensuring you get a return on investment with each hire is even harder.
Over the past few months, I’ve conducted more than 40 interviews with designers, motion graphics specialists, marketers, audio editors, and other experts. The biggest challenge I’ve encountered in hiring? Getting buy-in from potential hires as a small startup with limited resources.
The most difficult aspect of hiring as a small startup is purely the competition—established incumbents are siphoning all the great talent with better incentives and promises of employment stability.
We’ve paused most of our hiring efforts in the agency space and have decided instead to build networks with credible experts and work with freelancers and independent contractors as we gain more credibility as a company.
Our plan is to resume active hiring efforts in Q2 2026, when we believe we’ll have significant traction and visibility in the market following the launch of our upcoming products.
Redefining What Product Success Looks Like
Before embarking on this venture portfolio journey, I was working on numerous side projects. Success, for me, was simply finishing the project and getting it live.
I didn’t pursue the success metrics that any serious business would track when launching a product—these were mostly hobby projects, and that perspective needed to change dramatically.
Now, building a venture portfolio with investors expecting results, my understanding of what constitutes a successful product has shifted completely.
Our goal at Foundry One is to build Micro SaaS and competitive digital product brands that become the go-to solutions for people in specific markets like fintech, healthcare tech, and productivity.
We have specific ARR targets for each project, and achieving these takes talent, time, marketing, and—let’s be honest—a bit of luck.
Over the past four months, we’ve focused on creating systems for our idea launchpad: a comprehensive process and set of tools to take us from initial concept to finished product, then scale that product beyond the beta stage.
Our system encompasses product design and development, marketing and content creation, and customer satisfaction.
We believe a product needs three ingredients in perfect balance to be successful: First, you need a great product—something people actually need or want to use, something that solves a real problem. Second is marketing: getting people to know your product and building trust with potential customers.
Most of that trust comes from customer satisfaction, testimonials, and user-generated content featuring real people using your product in public.
We’re dedicating the next three months to building these systems so that as we enter 2026, we have a solid idea launch platform we can use to accelerate the process from idea to product success—something we can replicate across all the products we’re building.
Approaching Investors: A Steep Learning Curve
Perhaps the biggest learning curve for me—and I suspect for most technical founders—is approaching and finding the right partners to help products reach the next stage.
Our agency is responsible for building products from idea to market, but we need more firepower to expand our dedicated product teams and, of course, to go all-in on marketing to scale the products. Over the past two months, I’ve met with just over 15 angel and venture investors.
I had no idea how to navigate these conversations, and the fact that I’m not actively seeking investment at the moment made most of them feel pointless and premature. However, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about what goes into these conversations, which led me to start “Foundry One Insider”—an invite-only newsletter to keep potential investors and partners informed about what’s happening at Foundry One each month. Several of the investors I’ve spoken with over the past two months are already subscribers, and I’m looking forward to growing that audience over the next few months.
One thing that struck me is how investors expect you to be hyper-focused on a single venture to the point where they don’t understand—or even want to engage with—anyone looking to build a portfolio of products like Foundry One Group. This makes investor conversations more complicated and often feels competitive rather than collaborative.
I think investors need to allow founders to be more entrepreneurial rather than treating them like employees who should just focus on being CEOs of single ventures. Business isn’t one-dimensional, and founders should have the freedom and flexibility to explore and exploit market opportunities. That said, I still believe in focusing on a single thing, regardless of its complexity level. For Foundry One, that one thing is building a portfolio of products that are meaningful to people and change how we see and interact with technology—while building an ecosystem that supports turning ideas into reality.
We’re looking to scale our BO Docs product and will be engaging with potential investors and partners in the coming months to fundraise for this product, using it as a stepping stone for our bigger and more complex projects. This is the journey I’m most looking forward to because I have the most to learn here, rather than in product building and marketing.
Focus for the Next Four Months
My focus for the rest of the year is to scale BO Docs and launch invite-only access for our reimagined Khaya.money app, which will be a focal point in the South African fintech space in 2026. However, our focus isn’t limited to these products.
I believe pursuing great talent and partnerships over the next few months is critical to making our ecosystem successful. Focusing on systems, our launchpad, and growing our network will be the focal points of all our efforts for the remainder of the year.
I’m looking forward to ramping things up starting in 2026 with great momentum and a framework that allows us to grow, expand, and become a force in the South African startup landscape.