What it is
The website of Kudondza Solutions, an education technology startup I co-founded, registered in Mozambique and incubated at the Eduardo Mondlane University. I was a founding member and the technical lead.
This is the company’s front door, and it is a different project from Explicaki, which was the product we were building.
Why the company site is its own project
It is tempting to treat a startup’s marketing site as a distraction from the product. That was roughly my instinct at the time, and it was wrong.
A startup needs a credible public presence well before its product is finished, because everything else depends on it. An incubator wants to see one. A potential partner looks you up before replying. A prospective tutor deciding whether we were real checked the company, not the app. In a small market, “do these people actually exist” is a genuine question, and a site is the cheapest way to answer it.
So the site is not marketing overhead, it is credibility infrastructure. I would build it earlier next time, not later.
What is in it
- The company, its mission, and the team.
- The programmes and products, including Explicaki.
- A blog, built on MDX so it is writable by someone who is not a developer.
That last point was the main technical decision. A startup site that only the technical co-founder can update stops being updated the moment that person is busy, which for a technical co-founder is always. MDX files in a repository are not as friendly as a CMS, but they are close enough, and they cost nothing to run.
The stack, and why it is boring
Astro with React and MDX, deployed to static hosting.
Static by choice. A pre-revenue startup should not have a monthly hosting bill for a brochure site, and it should not have a server to patch. The whole thing compiles to HTML and sits on a free tier indefinitely.
An honest note about the domain
The original domain, kudondza.co.mz, was not renewed. That is the ordinary fate of a domain attached to a venture that slows down, and it is worth naming rather than hiding: the site is currently served from its hosting subdomain instead.
It is also a small lesson about handover and ownership. Domains lapse quietly, and a lapsed domain takes every link anyone ever shared with it. If the venture had been running when the renewal came up, someone would have noticed.
Status
Live on its hosting subdomain. The startup is registered and the site is up; the product, Explicaki, is no longer hosted.