An idea in 2011. Albanian friends in 2013. dua in 2019. By 2023, we were talking about an international audience. Looking back, the direction did not arrive fully formed.
Those dates describe one chapter of dua. The numbers and plans in the original recording belong to that period too.
The original need I described was connection among Albanians, including people living away from their home countries. Before there was a wider audience, there was a particular community and a reason to help its members find each other.
For someone starting a project, that offers a useful question: whose problem do you understand closely enough to explain without a presentation? Name the people, the difficulty and the connection you want to make possible.
In the caption, requests from other countries were part of the reason for changing direction. A larger possible audience alone is not the same as a reason to serve it. What are people asking for, and what would you need to change to help them well?
A founder’s story is built through such decisions. Looking back, keep the milestones clear and the context attached. The decisions make more sense when you can see what the business was trying to learn at that point.
The company’s direction kept developing. I returned to it when explaining why dua and Spotted would serve different audiences.