Ruth Okoli on What It Really Takes to Build Nestuge

Before Ruth Okoli began building a company, she had spent years learning how to help other people solve theirs.

Her professional formation was in learning and development before she moved deeper into management consulting, working across business analysis, strategy, process improvement, optimisation, supply chain and operations. It was a career that required her to understand how organisations work, identify what was not working and think carefully about what needed to change. She had developed a way of approaching problems: study them, understand the system, find the gaps, make a recommendation and work towards a better outcome.

Then came a different kind of problem.

The opportunity that became Nestuge came to her through a conversation with the person who had conceived the idea. Ruth had already been interested in the creator economy and had experimented with creating content herself, including sharing her thoughts around building a career in consulting. What caught her attention was the possibility that the internet was changing not only who could create, but what people could build around their knowledge. Experts, coaches and creators were increasingly turning what they knew into businesses, and she could see an infrastructure problem underneath the opportunity.

She wanted to help build what came next.

What she could not yet see was how much the decision would require her to become someone slightly different from the professional she had already spent years becoming.

The first difficulty was not the idea. It was the gap between what she knew and what the work suddenly demanded.

Ruth had entered with experience in business and strategy, but she did not come with a background in technology or the kind of marketing experience the new venture would require. There was no comfortable period in which she could quietly acquire every skill before being expected to use it. She had to learn while building. She researched. She paid for a course to understand marketing fundamentals. She learned through the work itself, and the distinction matters because learning on the job is different when the job is still being invented around you.

In a conventional career, a new responsibility often arrives with a title, a framework and someone who has done it before. Entrepreneurship can remove all three.

The questions become immediate. Who is the customer? What do they actually need? Will they pay for it? What should be built first? What should wait? What are people saying when they say no, and what are they not saying at all?

For Ruth, those questions became particularly real in the months after launch. For four to five months, there were no paying customers.

She describes that period with the bleak simplicity of opening a stall every day and making no sale. The work was happening, but there was little external evidence to reassure her that it was working. There were cold emails, direct messages, demonstrations with creators and coaches, conversations about their processes and attempts to understand what was difficult for them and what they actually wanted.

There were many no’s. There was silence. And because growth was part of Ruth’s responsibility, the absence of growth was not something she could observe from a distance.

This is one of the less visible realities of building a company: responsibility can make uncertainty feel personal. When a strategy does not work, it is not simply a disappointing result on a spreadsheet. It can become a question about judgment. About timing. About whether the thing you believed was worth building is actually worth building. About whether you are the person capable of carrying it.

Ruth questioned whether there was a future in what they were doing. She kept going.

That decision did not produce an overnight transformation. Instead, the work began to change the way she understood building. One of the most consequential decisions was to build a community around the product. It gave her and the team a closer understanding of the people they were trying to serve. The work became less about imagining what users might want and more about listening to what they were actually experiencing.

There is a quiet shift in that. The builder has to surrender some certainty.

You can begin with an idea of the problem. You can have research, experience and conviction. But eventually the people you are building for get a vote. Their behaviour tells you what matters. Their objections tell you where your assumptions are weak. Their silence tells you something too.

For Ruth, learning to listen more closely helped shape decisions about what to build, how to communicate and how to think about the needs of the people on the other side of the product.

It also brought her closer to one of the central truths of entrepreneurship: building is an exercise in revision.

The product changes. The strategy changes. The positioning changes.

And, if the person doing the building is paying attention, so does she.

Ruth says the experience has made her much more adaptable. She has learned to adjust quickly when circumstances change, to communicate expectations more clearly with her team and stakeholders, and to give and receive feedback with greater grace. She has also developed a stronger faith in her own abilities and intuition.

But perhaps the more revealing part of her reflection is less flattering.

She has discovered that she is intensely competitive and can become so focused on something she wants that everything else begins to disappear from view. That intensity can be useful. It can push a person through the kind of uncertainty that would make someone else stop. But it can also have consequences for the people working alongside her.

That is a more interesting form of self-awareness than the usual founder mythology allows.

Building does not only reveal a person’s strengths. It reveals the strengths that can become weaknesses when taken too far. The founder’s journey is often described as a story of confidence. Ruth’s experience suggests something more complicated. Confidence has not meant becoming certain that she will always be right. It has meant becoming more comfortable with the possibility that she may not know, that she may have to change her mind, and that she can still make a decision without having every answer.

There is also a difference between the way entrepreneurship looks from the outside and the way it feels from inside.

The title can look impressive. The company can look exciting. The announcements can make the journey appear linear. But behind the visible work are long meetings about product direction, positioning and priorities; decisions made with limited resources; disagreements that have to be resolved; expectations that have to be communicated; and the repeated task of deciding what deserves attention when everything appears important.

Ruth describes those long conversations with the core team as some of the work people rarely see, even though those decisions can determine the direction of the product and the strength of the team.

This is the private interior of building.

Not the launch, not the announcement, not the photograph.

The hours spent trying to decide what the thing should become.

It is also why Ruth’s story complicates the idea that founders simply need to be passionate enough. Passion may get someone into the room, but building asks for a more demanding collection of qualities: curiosity, discipline, commercial awareness, the willingness to learn things that may not be interesting, and the humility to discover that an idea you believe in still needs to be tested. Ruth is particularly direct about validation.

Her advice to prospective founders is to speak to potential customers before building. Find out whether the problem exists in the way you think it does. Understand whether it is painful enough for someone to pay for a solution. Otherwise, it is possible to spend months building something that solves a problem that was never as urgent as it appeared from the outside.

For women building companies, she places particular emphasis on learning the technical and less glamorous parts of business.

There is something significant in that insistence.

Women are often encouraged to develop visibility, confidence, communication and leadership. Those things matter. But there is another kind of confidence that comes from understanding the machinery underneath the work: knowing the numbers, understanding the systems, asking difficult questions and being able to participate meaningfully in decisions because you understand what is actually happening.

Knowledge is a form of agency.

Ruth did not begin this journey knowing everything she would eventually need to know. She does not present herself as someone who had a complete founder’s toolkit before she started. In fact, one of the things she wants people to remember is precisely the opposite: she began afraid. She did not have all the skills she needed. She had some useful knowledge from consulting and an understanding of business, but the real experience of building a company had to be acquired in motion.

That may be one of the most honest part of her story.

The person who began building was not fully equipped for the work. She became more equipped because she kept doing it.

This is where the distinction between building a company and becoming a founder becomes important. The title can be given on a day. The capacity to carry the title is built over time.

Ruth’s experience has changed the way she plans her own life. She now thinks in phases, treating different periods as different projects and recognising that not every season can demand everything from her at once. She has become more practical in the advice she gives people around her, less interested in telling them what they might want to hear and more willing to tell them what she believes they need to hear.

The work has changed her relationship with herself, too.

She is still competitive. Still intensely focused. Still learning. But there is more trust now, in her judgment, in her ability to adapt and in her capacity to figure things out when the path ahead is not obvious.

That is why Ruth’s story is not really about the moment she became a co-founder. It is about everything that happened after.

The uncertainty. The unanswered messages. The first customers. The periods when there were none. The skills she had to acquire because the business could not wait for her to feel ready. The decisions made around a table when resources were limited and the right answer was not obvious. The discovery that some of her best qualities could also become difficult ones. The gradual development of a different kind of confidence, not the confidence of knowing exactly what to do, but the confidence that she can learn what she does not yet know.

Building has not finished rewriting Ruth, and that’s the point.

A company can be measured by what it has produced, how far it has travelled or what it has achieved. A person’s becoming is harder to measure. It happens in the decisions nobody sees, the mistakes that never make it into public announcements, the difficult conversations, the skills acquired quietly and the mornings when showing up is itself an act of conviction.

Ruth calls what building has taught her simple: show up and be resilient.

Perhaps the simplicity is the point.

Because resilience is not always the dramatic refusal to quit. Sometimes it is the much quieter decision to return to the work, look honestly at what is not working, learn something new, change course where necessary and try again.

The company is still being built. So is the woman building it.