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A passion for numbers & technology-Emmanuel Derozin (Ma Coiffeuse Afro)

by Alban Dumouilla

Ma Coiffeuse Afro — The first web & mobile platform dedicated to afro hair, connecting hair dressers to customers on a very popular and demanding market

Ma Coiffeuse Afro, c’est la 1ère plateforme web et mobile dédiée à la coiffure afro, pour les femmes aux cheveux crépus, frisés et défrisés.

  • Founded: in 2016 by Rebecca Cathline and Emmanuel Derozin
  • City: Paris, France
  • Funding: 25K€ seed through NUMA Accelerator program
  • Company size at time of writing: 4 (+1/2 freelance)
  • Tech team composition: 1 CTO :)

What pizza are you having ?

Quattro stagioni: artichokes, tomatoes or basil, red and yellow bell peppers, mushrooms and ham.

You and the CTO job

What’s your background ?

I used to build small websites when I was a kid, first a fan site for a singer that I won’t talk too much about, and then e-commerce websites to sell Dofus’ currency that I would buy in bulk and sell with a margin. All that in PHP.

I then went through the SupInternet web cursus, which is a technology school in a broad sense. I wanted to do more than just web, so I did the Ecole 42 “piscine” to try to get in. I got in, but then my startup got accepted in NUMA (note; the writer is NUMA’s CTO), so I chose the accelerator.

How did you meet Rebecca and start the company?

I needed money to pay for tuition and started freelancing through Leboncoin (note; craigslist’s french equivalent). Rebecca contacted me to build a simple directory, and the feeling went really well. We started working for other people together, and realized that it went so well that we could do it for ourselves.

So instead of having an internship in another company, I asked my school to build my own company during my internship. We already had pretty good figures when it came to followers (45k instagram followers) — we now needed execution, a real website and not just a Wordpress anymore.

In one sentence, what do you consider your current job to be?

At the beginning it was a lot of development, but I realized pretty quick that it wasn’t the full role. I needed to think about the company’s strategy and prioritize between execution and long term view.

It’s a pretty complicated role, because I’m the bridge between the rest of the team (non-tech) and the technologies in general. I’m just starting to understand that I can delegate quite a lot of the job in the end, to be able to keep a close watch on the market, new techs, etc. I need to drive the company forward, and so I have less time to purely execute.

Has your job changed since you started? From dev to CTO maybe?

A lot. Strategy became prevalent ! Now I have a passion for numbers, technology intelligence, and market watch. I even work closely on the business plan, since one of NUMA’s mentors taught me about finance.

Let’s talk about tech

What is your stack and why ?

We’re fully Ruby on Rails, and in front we use VieJS, on a postgres database. We needed to go fast and I already knew RoR, so I went for it. I hope not to have to change too quickly in the future, but it’s not excluded.

When it comes to hosting, we have AWS S3 for statics and Heroku for the server side. Pretty classic.

Have you had to change your stack since you started?

Yes, we started with a Wordpress, as the site was only a directory. When we started thinking about handling payments and appointments, we needed a bigger platform.

I also had to review the database architecture 3 times at the beginning because we changed the way we handled appointments quite a bit.

Have you ever faced a crisis?

Yes, the site went down once because Heroku had some troubles. We also had problems with Twilio because our credit card got blocked, so Twilio stopped working and our hairdressers didn’t receive any confirmation text messages for their appointments, it created quite a mess.

We ended up manually sending the SMS when we realized the problem, and we issued coupons to customers that had an appointment cancelled because of this, but we still ended up with one bad review on the app store.

Every day CTO life

What is the hardest thing you’re facing right now?

Clearly UI/UX. I always thought that because I wasn’t too bad at it, I wouldn’t need a designer, but I’m starting to see the hard thought process behind building a complex product.

What is your most important responsibility as a CTO?

Making sure everything works, clearly. The second thing would be to keep dragging the team to meet our objectives, because I’m sharing some of the CEO tasks with Rebecca.

If you had to change something since the beginning, what would it be?

It took us too long to get started. We lost 3 to 6 months because we weren’t sure the service would work. The end is that we’re completely legal and we should have gone heads down a lot faster.

People

What are you searching for in a possible hire?

Someone that’s interested in the project, definitely. I need to see the motivation, the dynamism, the driving force that the person could add to the team.

For my next hire, I have a great UX video that I want to show them, and I’d want them to analyze what the point of views described in the video could bring to Ma Coiffeuse Afro.

Where do you see Ma Coiffeuse Afro in 2 years?

Everywhere in France, and leader of the market. And a few European countries as well. 4 people in the tech team, maybe ?

What are the hardest things you are going to face to reach that point?

Ideas are coming faster that execution, so prioritizing is going to be a real challenge. We’ll need to be smart about opening new regions, go one by one and send people there.

Interested in Ma Coiffeuse Afro ? Follow them !

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