Our founder originally bought the domain metroflame.com in November 2009 while living in Oxford, UK with the idea of running it as portal of sites with a news and blogs site, a classifieds, a shopping, and a deals site. At the time, he was preparing to start a new job as a Computational Biologist at the prestigious Sanger Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Cambridge, UK, but weighing other options.
He decided to move back to his home country and later received an admission at to study a PhD in Computational Science and Engineering at Michigan Technological University. In September 2011, the first version of Metroflame Classfieds was launched for 3 continents and 4 countries - US, Canada, United Kingdom, South Africa, and Ghana. He decided to work temporarily as a Web Developer with a web development company before moving to the United States to pursue the PhD program. While working there, he decided to defer his PhD program and pursue entrepreneurship. With the traffic for Metroflame Classifieds growing, the hosting company on his back to upgrade his plan, and having little time from his main job to maintain the site, he was forced to temporarily take it offline, eventually lasting longer than expected. He learned a valuable lesson that he could only build Metroflame successfully as a full-time venture.
After two years at this company, he joined a British Digital Agency as a Web Developer for a year before finally joining Vodafone, a British multi-national telecommunications company, to develop a Distribution Management System, dashboards, commercial sales reports and other business applications for the Sales and Distribution team and the Commercial function. He rebuilt DMS from a collection of procedural codes to a structured OOP enterprise-grade MVC application, adding a host of features, fixing a plethora of security issues and also integrating it with SAP (which was the ERP being used by Vodafone at the time) and VMS. He also worked as the Business SPOC on the development of Oracle Siebel CRM for Vodafone.
During his time at Vodafone, he realized the need of organizations for cloud-based business applications with affordable and flexible pricing plans, and started planning the business and architecture of a number of cloud-based SaaS applications and consumer apps. After three-and-a-half years at Vodafone, he left to work on Metroflame in stealth mode without external funding. During this time he also built a Distribution Management application for MTN, another multi-national telecommunications company as an independent contractor which led to a pause on the Metroflame project but provided valuable funds to further develop it on resumption.