2025 in Rewind (April–August)

Courtney
Courtney

2025 in Rewind (April–August)

If the first part of 2025 was about asking “what if?”, then April to August was about asking a much harder question:

“Okay… how do we actually build this?”

Coming off the hackathon wins earlier in the year, there was a lot of excitement — and honestly, a bit of pressure. Winning ideas is intoxicating. But somewhere between the applause and the group photos, reality kicks in: ideas don’t scale themselves.

This phase of the year forced me to slow down.

Not because I lost momentum, but because I realized that speed without direction is just noise.

From Hackathon Energy to Real-World Thinking

Around this time, AgriLease stopped being “that agritech idea we pitched” and started becoming something heavier — something real. I began looking at it less like a project and more like a responsibility.

I spent a lot of time thinking about:

  • Who exactly are we building for?
  • What problem actually hurts the most right now?
  • What can realistically work in a Zimbabwean context?

This is where romantic ideas meet constraints.

Limited access. Infrastructure gaps. Trust issues. Adoption friction. Payment realities. None of these show up on pitch decks early — but they decide whether your product survives.

The Uncomfortable Middle

April to August wasn’t flashy.

There were no prizes. No big announcements. No clear milestones to celebrate publicly. Just long stretches of thinking, rewriting, discarding, and rethinking again.

I learned quickly that:

  • Not every feature deserves to be built first
  • Some “cool” ideas are distractions in disguise
  • Constraints aren’t blockers — they’re design inputs

This phase demanded discipline more than creativity.

It also exposed how much leadership has nothing to do with writing code.

Learning to Lead (Quietly)

Somewhere in these months, my self-image started shifting.

I began the year thinking mostly like a developer:

How do I build this?

By August, my questions sounded more like:

Should this even be built right now?

That shift didn’t come from confidence — it came from friction.

From tough conversations. From trade-offs. From realizing that every technical decision has social, financial, and operational consequences.

Leadership, I learned, often looks like slowing things down so they don’t fall apart later.

Building for Context, Not Ideals

One of the biggest lessons from this period was understanding that building for Africa requires more than ambition.

It requires empathy.

You can’t copy-paste solutions and expect them to work. You have to design for reality:

  • Trust before scale
  • Access before polish
  • Reliability before innovation

This mindset reshaped how I evaluate ideas — not by how impressive they sound, but by how usable they are on the ground.

Foundations Over Momentum

Looking back, April to August was about foundations.

Quiet work.

Uncomfortable work.

The kind of work that doesn’t trend online, but determines whether anything meaningful can exist later.

It wasn’t about moving fast. It was about moving right.

And in hindsight, this might have been the most important phase of the year.

The next chapter (September–December) is where things begin to converge.