…eventually, progress became more and more difficult to justify and that reality was clearly indicated by the team’s moral. We had depleted the grant investment and lacked sufficient proof, even to ourselves that any further investment could yield better results on the Winsenga’s feasibility.

We we’re partly sure that may be Uganda wasn’t the right place to have launched the product first. Given the lack of policy around medical device certification. Launching Winsenga as medical device was going to cost more than we had the capacity to raise. Josh and I strongly believed that the product had to first address the immediate challenge of maternal and child morality rate.

Thinking back now, may be it could have been a better approach to launch Winsenga as a mother companion for devloped communities who could afford such a luxury and then use the money from that to invest in the much needed affordable medical device for prenatal care.

Having seen such an approach work well for competitor Bellabeat and a company like Tesla, I believed that could have been more enduring approach for this start-up.

In May 2017, 4 years after Josh and I wrote up the problem and idea for Winsenga that night in my small room at Livingstone all, after much debate and a lot of mixed feelings, I flew back to Kampala for a week and met with team and let them know I recommended that we pause the Winsenga project indefinitely. My suggestion wasn’t met with much surprise. The boys were very emotionally exhausted and nodded in agreement.

I learned from my one of my mentors, Dr Musaazi that innovators never really give up on their innovations but merely pause them. Given the right timing and conditions, these innovations always have the potential to be resumed. And that’s the tempo I set with the team when I shared this tough recommendation.

Nonetheless, pausing Winsenga was painful. So much effort, energy, trust and good will had gone into it. I felt and know the team did too that this move undermined our own credibility and made me question whether it had been wrong to embark on a journey without adequate financial resources.

I sought encouragement not just in my faith but in the numerous stories that chronicled many entrepreneurs who struggled in the early years of their ventures. I resolved to fight on, I am not sure what I could work on next. It’s probably much too soon to begin pondering that.

I left Kampala a few days after that meeting with the team and made a commitment to put in writing my lessons from the past 4 years so others entrepreneurs could learn from them but also for me.. to reflect on these lessons and not repeat the same mistakes in future.