By Anthony George
In March, Maurice John wrote a piece in this publication titled “Vincentian developers, it’s time to wake up.” He was right. He called out a pattern we have all lived through — SVG sleeping through the website era, sleeping through the mobile era — and he issued a challenge: sit in the same room, have the honest conversation, and start building together.
I read that article and recognised myself in it. And from what I understand, others did too — small groups have already begun forming in response to his call. That is exactly the kind of energy SVG needs, and I don’t want to undermine a single one of those efforts. I want to build on all of them.
Because here is the risk: if those groups stay separate, we end up with the same problem wearing a different name. Small pockets of motivated people, working in parallel, solving pieces of the puzzle without ever seeing the whole picture. What we need is not more groups — it is one room, physical and virtual, where developers, business owners, aspiring founders, and institutions can hear each other directly. So I want to pick up where Maurice left off — and invite everyone already moving to move together.
Quick Summary
If you read nothing else, read this:
SVG has produced real tech talent for years. Most of our ventures stall at the same point — not because the ideas are bad, but because we build in isolation, misread early excitement for real success, and have no structured support once competitions and grants end.
Developers and businesses are not talking to each other. Developers guess at problems. Businesses sit on real ones nobody has asked them about. That gap is fixable.
AI has changed the rules. Building a world-class product no longer requires a large team or significant capital. But speed without the right foundation still leads to failure — just faster.
I’m launching Build SVG — a structured founder community to change this. One room. Everyone in it. Developers, businesses, institutions, diaspora.
I’m also available for technology consulting — helping businesses translate their real operational problems into technical solutions, and helping founders validate ideas before they build the wrong thing.
If any of this speaks to you, the calls to action at the end of this article are for you.
My Part of This Story
I want to start with something most founders in SVG never say out loud.
I built an app. It got traction. People used it. Businesses joined it. We even won regional recognition. And then it quietly stopped growing — and I let it go.
Between 2017 and 2019, I co-founded Linkup — a local business discovery platform for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. At our peak, we had over 5,000 users and more than 300 business listings across 72 categories. We competed in the TEECA Caribbean Entrepreneurship Challenge and held our own against teams from across the region.
And then it stalled.
Not because the idea was wrong. Not because Vincentians didn’t want it. But because I — like most founders here — made a mistake I didn’t understand until years later.
I mistook early excitement for product-market fit.
The first users were enthusiastic. The first businesses to list were supportive. The numbers looked promising. I believed those numbers told the whole story. They didn’t. What I was seeing was the energy of novelty, not the signal of real, sustainable demand. By the time that distinction became clear, the momentum had faded and the path forward felt uncertain.
Since then, I left SVG for the UK. But I want to be clear: my heart and every entrepreneurial idea I’ve ever had never left these shores. I am genuinely invested in building this nation. The professional experience I’ve gained in the UK, the perspectives I’ve picked up travelling across Europe and Southeast Asia — the different ways people solve problems, build communities, and grow businesses in constrained environments — it has all been quietly accumulating, waiting for the moment I could bring it back and put it to use. That moment is now.
I’m not alone in this pattern. Look at SVG’s tech ventures over the past decade. Genuinely creative ideas, real effort, real talent — and a pattern of ventures that reach a certain point and go quiet. The NTRC’s I-Squared and iCode784 competitions have surfaced some outstanding concepts. Where are most of those ventures today?
I’m not asking that to be harsh. I’m asking because the honest answer tells us something important about what we need to change.
Why I Think We Keep Failing — My Honest Hypothesis
These are my assumptions, not established facts. I’m putting them forward because I think they’re worth an honest conversation, and I’m genuinely open to being challenged.
We misread early hype for success. Downloads, sign-ups, and media coverage feel like validation. Often they’re not. Real product-market fit is more demanding: a clearly defined group returning unprompted, recommending without being asked, and eventually willing to pay. It shows up in retention and word-of-mouth — not in launch-week numbers. It is evidence, not a feeling. Most of us never reached that bar before treating early excitement as proof we were on the right track.
We build in isolation — from each other and from the businesses we’re trying to serve. There is no structured space in SVG where founders share what’s working and what isn’t. Every founder starts from scratch and makes the same painful mistakes alone. Worse, developers and businesses aren’t talking to each other either.
Developers spend months building solutions to problems they’ve guessed at, while businesses sit on real, specific, unsolved challenges nobody has thought to ask them about. A single honest conversation between the two groups would short-circuit months of wasted effort.
We compete where we should collaborate. During the Linkup years, I was aware of at least two other local platforms tackling adjacent problems — Konservi and Go Getta. None of us were talking to each other. In a market this size, when founders build similar things in parallel, nobody splits a large opportunity — everyone fails to reach the critical mass they each needed to survive.
We have no structured bridge from idea to scale. Competitions end. Grants get spent. The excitement fades. There is no consistent framework that walks a Vincentian founder from idea validation through to a sustainable business. Without it, even our best ideas are left to figure it out alone — and most don’t.
What Our Institutions Have Built — And What’s Still Missing
SVG is not starting from zero. Far from it.
The National Centre for Technological Innovation (NCTI) has done significant work to build this ecosystem. Under the CARCIP Business Incubation and Training Grants programme, the NCTI supported 21 local businesses and tech innovators as incubatees, distributing over EC$2.5 million in grants for equipment, software, marketing, and skills development. More recently, through the Canadian-funded LEAF Project (Local Engagement and Action Fund), the NCTI is helping small businesses enter the digital economy — connecting them to accounting software, financial institutions, and the basic digital tools they need to survive and grow.
The NTRC has consistently created platforms for Vincentian innovators to present their ideas to the world. Invest SVG has ICT listed as a priority investment sector and has recently signalled a renewed focus on mobilising diaspora knowledge and skills — not just financial capital. The Chamber of Commerce represents the business community that every tech venture ultimately needs to serve.
These institutions have invested real resources in SVG’s tech future. That deserves to be honoured — and built upon.
But here is where I believe the gap remains: funding and competitions are interventions at the beginning of the journey. What happens after?
A founder who completes an incubator programme and launches their product still has to find product-market fit, figure out monetisation, and grow in a market with limited margin for error — often entirely alone. That is the stage
where most SVG ventures, including mine, have gone quiet. A peer community, structured accountability, and access to proven methodology could change that.
That’s the gap I want to help close.
What I’ve Been Doing Since Linkup
After stepping back from Linkup, I didn’t step back from the field. I’ve spent the years since building a professional technology career — gaining hands-on experience across technical and strategic roles, deepening my knowledge through industry certifications, and currently completing an MSc in Information Capability Management. That degree is sharpening how I think about technology strategy and what’s worth building before you commit to building it.
I’ve also been watching the global shift toward AI-native business models closely. We are living through a moment where the barriers that once stopped a small-island founder from competing globally — engineering talent, infrastructure, capital — are being dismantled. A founder in Kingstown with the right tools and methodology can now build a world-class product. That wasn’t fully true when I built Linkup. It is true now.
You can find the full picture of my background on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-george/.
I came back to this because SVG’s window of opportunity is real — and it won’t stay open indefinitely. The countries that learn to build AI-native businesses in this decade will have a structural advantage that compounds over time. I don’t want SVG to watch that window close.
What I’m Proposing
I’m not here to announce a new app. I’ve learned that announcing before validating is one of the most costly mistakes a founder can make. What I’m proposing is something that needs to exist before more apps get built; a form of public and community validation.
1. Build SVG — A Community Built for This Moment
I’m launching Build SVG: a structured community for current and former tech entrepreneurs across SVG and the wider Caribbean, aspiring founders with ideas they haven’t acted on yet, and anyone who wants to understand what it actually takes to build a technology business in this region.
This is not a WhatsApp group where people share links and go quiet. It’s a founder community with a clear purpose: shared learning, honest accountability, and coordination so we stop wasting scarce resources competing against each other in a market too small for that.
Here is what Build SVG will do:
- Monthly virtual meetups — structured, focused, and recorded for those who can’t attend live
- A shared resource library — frameworks, tools, and case studies adapted for Caribbean founders and our specific market realities
- Territory coordination — a simple, transparent process for founders to signal what they’re building, so others can build around it rather than into it
- Structured startup methodology — proven international frameworks for taking an idea from rough hypothesis to validated product to sustainable business, adapted for SVG’s constraints
Build SVG is explicitly open to Vincentians in the diaspora. You don’t need to be on the island to contribute to what gets built here.
2. Technology Consulting
Alongside Build SVG, I’m open to offering technology consulting to SVG businesses and entrepreneurs.
My focus is on helping organisations apply AI and modern technology as genuine operational infrastructure — the kind that lets a small team do work that previously required a much larger one. For SVG businesses operating with limited staff and tighter margins, that is rapidly becoming a competitive necessity.
For established businesses, this means identifying where technology can reduce costs, improve customer experience, or open new revenue streams — and having someone help you navigate that clearly.
For aspiring founders, this means structured guidance through the startup lifecycle — from sharpening a rough idea into a testable hypothesis, to building a first product, to finding paying customers and designing a business model that works for SVG’s market size.
For Build SVG, this means being the technical product manager that connects these two camps together: businesses with real problems to local developers who can build local and affordable solutions; translating high-level business requirements into technical product requirement documents, and facilitating a professional and transparent procurement process.
A word on two things I hear often.
First — AI has made it faster than ever to go from idea to product. That is exciting, but it cuts both ways. The same speed that gets you to market faster also gets you to failure faster if you haven’t validated that a real problem exists and that real people will pay to have it solved. Moving fast without that foundation doesn’t compress the startup journey. It just accelerates the wrong part of it.
Second — I know some founders are reluctant to share ideas openly for fear others will steal them and get to market first. That concern is understandable, but misplaced. The idea is rarely the competitive advantage. Execution is.
Market knowledge is. The trust you build with your customer base is. A founder who validates deeply and builds deliberately will outlast anyone who copied their idea and rushed it to launch without doing the same work. In SVG’s relationship-driven market, that is especially true.
What I help founders and businesses do is move past the hype, past the vanity metrics, and past the MVP milestone
— toward products that solve real problems and businesses built to last.
I take on a small number of consulting clients at a time to ensure the work is done properly. If you’re interested, send me an email at [email protected]
A Message to Our Institutional Partners
To the NTRC, Invest SVG, NCTI, the Chamber of Commerce, and the teams working on SVG’s digital transformation agenda:
What you have built matters. The investments you’ve made in identifying talent, providing funding, and creating platforms for Vincentian innovators have been foundational. I benefited from that ecosystem. Many of us did.
What I’m building is not in competition with that work. It’s designed to extend its reach.
A competition identifies talent. An incubator provides early-stage structure and resources. But the journey from promising startup to sustainable business is long, non-linear, and deeply isolating — especially in a small market where few people have walked the same road. Build SVG is designed to be the peer infrastructure that outlasts formal programmes, keeping founders connected and learning long after a competition or cohort has ended.
I want to say something specific to the Chamber of Commerce, because I think there is an immediate and practical opportunity here that goes beyond community-building.
SVG’s developer community is growing. The response to Maurice John’s article has made that clear. But developers building in isolation from the business community will keep making the same expensive mistake: guessing at problems instead of solving confirmed ones. The Chamber sits on exactly what developers need most — direct access to real businesses with real operational challenges they would genuinely pay to have solved.
I am proposing a structured dialogue: a regular, facilitated conversation between the Chamber’s business members and SVG’s emerging developer community. Businesses share their actual problems. Developers hear those problems directly. Where a business-need maps to a technical solution, that becomes a real brief — not a guessed hypothesis. Where multiple developers are interested in building for the same need, they know that from the start. That transparency makes for healthier competition and a more professional, accountable procurement process for everyone involved.
This is not a complicated intervention. It is a facilitated conversation that currently isn’t happening. And it is one of the highest-leverage things we could do to change SVG’s startup success rate.
If you work with founders who need that kind of ongoing support, or with businesses who are ready to have that conversation, I want to talk. I believe our efforts become more effective together.
I am easy to reach. The conversation costs nothing. Send me an email at [email protected]
Who I’m Looking For — And Why You Should Join Today
Let me speak directly to each of you, because you each have a different reason to be part of this.
If you built something in SVG that didn’t make it:
Your experience is the most valuable thing this community has. Not your success story — your honest account of what you tried, what you learned, and what you’d do differently. The next generation of founders needs access to that, and right now there is no structured place where it gets shared. Don’t let what you went through go to waste.
Join the Founders Room group within the Build SVG community on WhatsApp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/IW27LlYX3KK4Yk9i9sm8LR?mode=gi_t — Be part of the founding circle. Help shape what this becomes.
If you have an idea you haven’t acted on:
Maybe you don’t know where to start. Maybe you tried before and it didn’t work. Maybe you’re not technical, or you think SVG is too small, or you’re waiting for the right moment. Come to the first virtual meet-up. Bring your idea exactly as rough as it is. You’ll leave with a clearer sense of whether it’s worth pursuing — and what the first real step actually is.
Join the Ideas Stage group within the Build SVG community on WhatsApp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/F2HEtUHsB8CDILCwGhk7pt?mode=gi_t
If you’re a business owner watching technology change your industry:
You don’t need to understand AI to benefit from it. But you do need someone who understands both the technology and the realities of the Vincentian market to help you think it through clearly. I work with a small number of clients at a time to make sure the work is done properly.
Join the SVG Businesses group within the Build SVG community on WhatsApp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/DxtH3qUEKD33JMIOQ4RvqD?mode=gi_t — Share a few details about your business and what you’re trying to solve. I’ll be in touch directly.
If you’re a Vincentian in the diaspora:
You left SVG. So did I. But you didn’t stop caring about what happens there, and your skills, perspective, and network are exactly what SVG’s tech ecosystem needs more of. Build SVG is built for founders and contributors who are working remotely. You don’t need to be on the island to help shape what gets built here.
Join the Diaspora Builders group within the Build SVG community on WhatsApp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/CfLiIP3Enkz1kbCUmD3SIt?mode=gi_t — Remote participation is not second-class. It’s the model.
If you represent an institution or government agency:
I’m not asking for funding or formal endorsement. I’m asking for a conversation about how we make each other’s work more effective. If you run programmes that support local tech entrepreneurs, Build SVG can extend the life and impact of that work.
Email: [email protected] | Subject line: Build SVG — Partnership Conversation
One Last Thing
Maurice John ended his article with a call: “reach out, let’s form the group, call the meeting.” This is me doing exactly that.
I want to be honest about what this isn’t. It isn’t a grand plan I’m certain will work. It’s a considered bet — informed by experience, shaped by hard lessons, and grounded in a genuine belief that what SVG’s tech ecosystem has been missing is a community of founders who are honest with each other.
I’ve been wrong before. I’ll be wrong again. But the cost of not trying — in a moment when the tools to try have never been more accessible — is higher than the cost of trying and adjusting.
SVG has always had the talent. What we’ve lacked is the infrastructure around it: the peer support, the shared knowledge, the honest accountability that turns good ideas into lasting businesses.
Let’s build it. Together, this time.
The opinions presented in this content belong to the author and may not necessarily reflect the perspectives or editorial stance of ANN. Opinion pieces can be submitted to [email protected].