Favour Felix on following the problems that bother you

Favour Felix has a habit of building things, not because he wakes up every morning with a grand startup idea, but because something much smaller keeps tugging at him. An inconvenience, a thing that should work but doesn't, a problem he runs into and cannot quite stop thinking about.

At one point, he had gathered more than a thousand bookmarks and notes in the YouVersion Bible App. He had been using the tool actively since 2018 and had saved all kinds of things there, but he kept hitting the same wall: he couldn't find any of it again. "I was like, why can't I just find what I had stored a long time ago?" He sent emails. Nothing changed. So he built something for himself.

Another time, he was sitting in church, watching the screens during service, when he noticed a different kind of problem. His church had a large screen, but the software running it was never built for how churches actually work: songs, Bible verses, announcements, several people preparing for a service, someone adding something from home while another person is at church. The existing tools could be forced to do the job, but they weren't made for it. That observation became an internship of sorts in his church's media ministry, then a prototype, and eventually Cloud of Worship.

Somewhere in the middle of all this was a major transition of his own. He left his first proper job without another one waiting, tried to build something from scratch, watched that idea fail, moved through an unfamiliar industry, joined Cowrywise, and slowly learned that being an engineer does not mean your work begins and ends with writing code.

For Favour, in other words, Day One has rarely been just one day. Sometimes it was the first day after leaving something stable. Sometimes it was the first day of trying to understand an industry he knew very little about. And sometimes it was simply the moment he noticed a problem and thought, “perhaps I can build something here”.

We spoke to Favour as part of our Day One series on Daysim, about the first days nobody really prepares you for. His story is about building, but underneath that, it is about something quieter: paying close enough attention to the world around you to notice what is missing.

Leaving without a landing spot

Favour's first major role was at Acumen, where he joined as a mid-level front-end engineer and stayed for about three years. Then he left. But not in the familiar way, where one job ends because another offer is already waiting. "I wasn't necessarily leaving for a job," he says.

While he was still at Acumen, he had started building something, a platform that would let employees within a company review one another anonymously, an idea born out of a problem his engineering manager was trying to solve at the time. He had big plans for it, and he built, experimented, and tried different ways to make it work. It didn't. "I wouldn't call it a business at the time because it was an idea that I had built to scratch a particular itch." He spent a while trying to revise it, looking for a version of the idea that might hold, and eventually moved on when he realised he wasn’t very keen on “selling a product in an industry (Human Resource) that I had no prior knowledge of or deep interest in”.

There is something worth sitting with in that. Not every Day One begins with a five-year plan. Sometimes you leave something, try an idea, watch it fail, attempt a fix, realise you are working in a space you don't understand well enough, and then find your attention drifting toward an entirely different problem. That is more or less what happened next.

Getting close to the problem before solving it

Cloud of Worship began in mid-2024, out of something Favour had noticed as a member of his church's congregation and choir. The church had a big screen, but from where he sat, it was clear that using it smoothly was another matter. "I could see that there wasn’t a right tool for the context of congregational gathering that you have in the church." Presentation software like PowerPoint or Google Slides could technically do some of what a church needed, but none of it was designed around Bible verses, songs, hymns, announcements, or the reality of several people preparing and updating content around a live service.

So Favour decided to get closer to the problem before trying to solve it. The head of the media team had asked him before to join, but he had always been committed to the choir. This time he offered a compromise: "I'll just come and do, like, an internship, so to speak, in the media ministry for a couple of months." It was a Day One in the purest sense. He didn't walk in assuming he already had the answer. He went into the room, watched how things worked, and tried to understand the people actually wrestling with the problem. Within about two weeks, they had their first working prototype.

That prototype became Cloud of Worship, which Favour describes simply as "like a PowerPoint or Google Slides for the church." The difference is in the details. A church can add songs, Bible verses, and announcements. People can collaborate. Someone can prepare a service at home and log in at church to find it waiting, or add something in real time while another person keeps their eyes on the preacher. Even the song library became a shared thing: "If a church has a song, any other church around the world should be able to access it." For Favour, this is the lesson building keeps teaching him, that the problems which look tiny from the outside are often the ones that matter most to the people actually using what you made. Those tiny things add up.

His own website describes him as someone "always building excellent software, interwoven between my faith and exuberant mundanity," which is a fitting way to describe a project that started with a man in a choir noticing a frustrating experience and deciding to spend a few months understanding it.

Learning an industry from the inside

Building Cloud of Worship didn't magically solve the problem of funding both a growing project and his own life. "I had to start looking for a way to fund Cloud of Worship and also fund my life," he says. So he got a job, and that job took him into Cowrywise and much deeper into the financial world than he had been before.

Favour had built fintech products at Acumen, but he draws a real distinction between working on a product in an industry and being immersed in the industry itself. "It is actually different when the industry is a concentration than when it is like a walk through." At Cowrywise, he found himself needing to understand the world around the products, the asset classes, the financial concepts, the language professionals use. He started learning more deliberately, including enrolling in the CFA Foundations Programme, because he realised that while he could technically do his work without all of it, deeper knowledge changed the quality of how he worked. "I can do it without gaining all of the finance knowledge, but there's a level of efficiency that you want to get, so you just have to get that."

That is another part of Day One we don't talk about enough. The job title can be familiar, the core skill unchanged, where you are still an engineer, but the context shifts. And when it does, part of getting better at your job is getting curious about the world your job lives in.

Finding your place among people who already have theirs

Starting somewhere new brought its own uncertainty. Favour was joining a team whose members had already worked together for years, with their own habits, relationships, and shorthand long before he arrived. "There was this fear of joining a new company, for starters. Like, how am I supposed to find my place?"

The adjustment ran both ways. Before he arrived, the team was small enough to communicate almost entirely through direct messages. Now there was another person in the mix, which meant channels, and making some things explicit that used to be assumed.

Also, coming from an agency, Favour had assumed, as many people do, that working on a single product might feel like a relief after juggling many clients. "Now I don't have to work on multiple clients' projects. I just have to work on one person's project." He laughs at that now. "Oh no." It was fast in a different way entirely. That is one of the more useful things about a new Day One: you arrive with a picture of what it will be like, and discover your past experience has prepared you for some of it and not at all for the rest. You learn, adjust, and in time, some of the things that unsettled you at the start become part of what changes how you work.

The conviction that shapes how he builds

One of the things Favour has enjoyed most is working closely with customer experience, and for someone building his own products, it lines up with something he already believes: the people on the edges of your user base still count. He puts it in plain arithmetic. “There will always be a set of users, maybe five percent, who are hyper-focused on one particular feature. But five per cent of a large number is still a large number, and even if it were one person, it would still matter.”

This customer-obsessed conviction is exactly how he runs Cloud of Worship. The product has grown, and is now used across churches serving thousands of people. His own church might not touch certain features, which could tempt him to assume they don't matter, until users complain about them and he has to go back and watch, literally. Cloud of Worship records product sessions so the team can see how people actually use the software, and Favour has taken to studying them closely for the moments where someone gets stuck. "This is one of my Netflix shows these days. I just go ahead and watch how people are using it." It sounds funny, but it is a serious product lesson. You can build something with a clear idea of how it should work, and then a real person uses it in a completely different way. That doesn't make them wrong. It usually means you have something to learn. So he watches, he notices, and sometimes a problem affecting a single person becomes worth fixing, because that one person is still part of the experience he built. "I have seen firsthand how impressing a customer can make them feel very excited, and keep them for longer." For Favour, there are different levels of saying you care about customers, and different levels of actually learning to.

A business that is still becoming one

Cloud of Worship started as a project, and Favour is careful to keep that honest. It wasn't built with a grand business plan bolted on. It was something he saw, understood, and decided to solve. Today it has paying users and sustains itself, but he still talks about it with the clarity of someone who knows the difference between a project that earns enough to survive and a fully realised business. "It is largely a passion project and it is a business." The team charges, as he puts it, because "the project has to stay alive." The money keeps it moving, though there is money he put in early that he hasn't recovered, and the growth so far has been almost entirely organic. No influencer campaign, no big ad spend. Some people find it by word of mouth, others through YouTube, and the articles he and the team wrote early on quietly built the search visibility that still brings people in. "That has been our distribution strategy. There is no, we haven't really done anything more than that." There is something fitting in that: a product born from noticing a problem has grown mostly by people finding it when they need that same problem solved.

No better time than now

Towards the end of our conversation, Favour said something that I absolutely love, "There is no better time to do quite a lot than now." That, more than anything, seems to be the thread running through his career. His first days have rarely been neat transitions with one chapter closing just as the next opens. Sometimes he left before he knew what came next. Sometimes he built something that didn't work. Sometimes he realised he didn't yet understand the ground he was building on. Sometimes a personal annoyance became a project, and a few months in a church media team became software used by other churches.

The lesson isn't that every inconvenience should become a startup. It is that Day One can begin much earlier than we think. It can begin the moment you notice something, the moment you ask why a problem still exists, the moment you decide to learn more before pretending you have the answer, the moment you realise the side project you almost dismissed might actually matter to other people too. For Favour, starting again has had less to do with feeling ready and more to do with paying attention, and then building. Because sometimes there really is no better time to do quite a lot than now.

Day One is a Daysim series about the first days nobody prepares you for. Daysim is a secure platform where you can practise new roles before you begin.