August 6th 2019, was the day my life would change for the better. The only interesting thing is about a week earlier, when I got my offer from Yellow Card, I had no idea that this would happen.

3 years prior, I had my first contact with cryptocurrency. I was in my room at university and my high school classmate called me out of the blue. He was so excited and was going on and on about the blockchain and the digital currency Bitcoin. The hour-long conversation ended with me purchasing my first sham coin, The billion coin (TBC). I was so excited about the possibilities that I called my sisters and geeked out on everything and how they should buy some TBC so that we could later convert it into Bitcoin. They heeded me and about 3,000 USD went down the drain. I couldn’t convert my TBC or do any transaction and that was when I decided to buy some BTC on BitX (now Luno) a few months later.

The experience left a bad taste in my mouth but not in my mind, I am a serial first adopter after all. In 2018 I had another bad experience with a trader that I will not bore you with today. These back to back experiences caused me to take a back seat regarding crypto for a while and observe.

I started to do graphics design in 2016 and had a good run but I wanted to do more. I loved how easy it was for me to use cms platforms like WordPress to build stuff and I just kept tinkering away. In 2019, I discovered product design (popularly called UI/UX at the time) during a design class at Geneza school of design and I fell in love. I knew that I wanted to build products that solved important problems.

I worked on some dummy projects and kept applying until I got an offer from Yellow Card. I was the 10th employee. I started working with glee, it was my second remote role experience and I was excited about the possibilities. The team was trying to raise funding, and build a product and team all at the same time.

There wasn’t a lot of structure but I loved that things moved fast and were super exciting. I had to wear many hats in my first year: marketing designer, product designer, guerrilla marketer, content strategist, product owner, and content curator. I was even a presenter at this event we participated in. I had one goal and it was to see the company grow. I believed so much in the vision and I was excited about my part in the process.

Yellow Card has hard workers as founders and it tricked down to the rest of us. The best part for me was the openness and accessibility and how much I understood how things worked. There is nothing I wanted to know that I didn’t know and it felt great to be trusted in this way with information that wasn’t necessarily my business.

For the things that were my business, I worked tirelessly to make sure they shipped. I worked on the Webapp, mobile app, website, academy and our in-house admin panel. That last one was particularly challenging because I had to do a lot of learning about crypto’s inner workings and the engineers were my best friends :)

I watched the company go from under 100,000 customers to about 1million, from 10 employees to over 150 people and I tell you, there is no better feeling. It was like watching a child grow and it’s amazing.

There was a dedication to learning and we were all encouraged to learn new things and try out our hands at things we were interested in. I loved that I could speak my mind and express my displeasure at things when I saw things happening that didn’t sit well with me and I didn't have to worry about losing my job.

I remember when our goal in marketing at the time was to get to 10k followers on Instagram so we could do more and all hands were on deck to achieve this. Collaboration is the order of the day and it was beautiful to watch everybody learning and growing with each other.

I had my slip-ups multiple times and the focus was always on helping me do better and I really appreciate that. It’s been almost 3 years of learning, building and growing. I worked with the best people and I wouldn't have it any other way.

It’s going to take me a while to stop saying our product, and I know that I will always have good mushy feelings towards Yellow Card and I am rooting for the company and all the amazingness they will create in the web3 space.

Till the end of May, I am going to be resting, upskilling and spending time with my family. I’ll be immersing myself in the blockchain space and learning actively about the new things happening in the space and how I want to contribute.

I’ll be looking out for exciting projects in the web3 space I can be part of and if your company is building something exciting, send me a message, lets's see if we are a good fit for each other.

It’s the end of an exciting era but the start of some more excitement too. My life changed because I got the opportunity to build an amazing product with Yellow Card and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, thank you for your time.

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