The Garage 2.0 is here!

When Darlington, AJ, and I sat in front of our very cheerful 30-person crowd that Friday evening last November as we introduced The Garage to the world for the first time, we knew that we were building something important that people would love.

We knew that we didn’t just want to stop there; we wanted to build more facilities, grow our community, and create technology that made it easier for young students to do work. But first, we needed to make some progress here—to validate our proof of concept. And boy, did we do that!

Over 2,000 users and 100,000 work hours later, we cannot say that we expected to grow this much in such a short time. We now know that we can solve a very important problem for over 4 million Nigerian university students, and we want to do it in the best way we can.

A few months ago, we started building a product to solve major operational challenges that we faced, especially over-demand. Having over 2,000 people needing a 40-person facility meant that the most crowded part of The Garage was usually the reception—as our mechanics patiently waited for a seat to free up for them. While some might argue that this is a good problem to have, for us—it was a nightmare.

Our goal has always been to make working hard easy for our community, and standing for hours waiting for a seat to work from is anything but easy. We knew what we had to do, and we got to work.

The plan was simple: to build a two-ended product that allowed customers and space managers to manage the entire booking experience from anywhere—reserve seats, make payments, and manage bookings.

After six excruciating months, we’re finally able to show the very first version of this product, but we’re still only just getting started. Over the past few months, interacting with customers for this project, we’ve grown to better understand how technology can make work easier for young people, especially around productivity, education, and opportunities.

We’re committed to leveraging this understanding to build the perfect product for young people looking to learn and do good work, and to support as many young people as possible with the core infrastructure they need—power supply and quality internet connection.

We received our first paying customer on Monday, November 13, 2023, so it is quite poetic that today, August 13, 2024, exactly nine months to the day, we are launching this product. We planted a seed, and after a full term, it bore fruit.

Now, we have to nurture this fruit into a full-grown tree, providing shelter and satisfaction to those who need it most.

It will not be easy; the journey ahead will be hard, but so will we.

Lets get building!

Visit thegarage.ng