In 2011, I co-founded Qysh Me, an Albanian-language educational platform aimed at students in Kosovo and the diaspora. We were building in a market that most investors had never heard of, in a language with no real digital presence, at a time when smartphones were just starting to reach the region.
It later got acquired by DUA. Here is what I learned along the way.
Build for the constraint, not around it
Our users had slow internet. Many accessed the platform from shared family computers or cheap Android phones. Instead of treating this as a blocker, we made it a design principle: every page had to load fast, every interaction had to work on a bad connection.
That constraint made us better. We cut features ruthlessly. We optimized before we launched. We tested on the worst hardware we could find.
Most products never do this. They optimize for the demo, not the reality.
Language is a moat
Building in Albanian was not just a market decision; it was a trust signal. Users knew we were building for them, not localizing something made for someone else. That emotional connection drove retention in ways that features never could.
If you can serve a community in their own language, natively, you have an edge that is very hard to copy.
An acquisition is a milestone, not an ending
When DUA acquired Qysh Me, a lot of people around me treated it like the finish line. I did not feel that way. It felt more like handing off a relay baton; the work continues, just with different hands.
The real lesson was about building something worth acquiring: a product people actually used, a brand people trusted, and a team that cared about the mission.
That is the only kind of acquisition that matters.