From Data to Wig Care: How One Founder's Personal Frustration Sparked a Startup

A Canopy Community ‘Summer of Startups’ Founder Spotlight & Interview | Conducted by Nolani Lloyd.  Connect with Nolani https://www.linkedin.com/in/nolani-lloyd-/

Within six weeks, Canopy Community's Summer of Startups accelerator helps founders take an idea from concept to demo night — with scholarships on the line for top finalists. This year, one of our standout participants is building something you won't find anywhere else on the market: a machine that washes, dries, and detangles wigs.

We sat down with Oluwabukola "Buki" Akanbi, a Nigerian founder currently based in Lisbon, to talk about her path from geospatial data science to entrepreneurship. We dove into the moment that sparked her idea, and what she's learned so far in the program.

From Nigeria to Lisbon: A Background in Data, Not in Hair

Buki's path to founder life didn't start with a connection to the beauty industry. She holds a bachelor's degree in geography and a master's in geospatial technologies, earned through an Erasmus program that took her between Lisbon and Germany. It was an international cohort — just 12 students, including classmates from the US, India, Morocco, and Colombia — brought together during the COVID era.

Her academic and early career background centers on data analytics, ArcGIS, and web development, using satellite imagery to help predict and respond to problems like flooding and earthquakes. It's technical, high-stakes work focused on turning raw data into better decisions.

"My journey has been exciting," Buki says, "because I have a very broad skill set in data analytics and web development. Right now, I think it's just about combining all of that into something."

Why Startups? A Legacy She's Continuing

Buki's pull toward entrepreneurship isn't abstract — it's personal. Before her father passed away, he had plans to start a hydropower business with her. "I'm really going to continue with that legacy," she says. Losing him didn't end that ambition; it redirected it.

The hydro power idea is still on her radar for the future. But she realized she needed to start somewhere else first — building the skills and instincts of running a company before tackling something as capital-intensive as energy infrastructure. This is what brought her to Canopy Community.

The Startup Idea: Born From One Exhausted Night

Buki's current startup has nothing to do with satellites or energy — it's a machine designed to wash wigs of all kinds.

Coming home from work one night, stressed and low in time, Buki wanted to wash her wig but simply didn't have the bandwidth to do the process by hand. "Wouldn't it be nice," she remembers thinking, "to have something that can just do this for me?" That exhaustion became the lightbulb moment for her concept: a machine that handles wig care for you, freeing up time for those people that wear them.

It's an idea with no direct competitor. "There is nothing like it in the market," Buki says — which is both a major opportunity and the source of her biggest uncertainty. Will customers adapt to something entirely new? Will they come back for repeat purchases, or will the first sale be a novelty? Those are the questions she's been discussing with her Canopy mentors, as she works towards a demo of the product.

Working Toward an MVP — And What That Actually Means

Right now, Buki is deep in the early-stage: researching the market, running product-fit analysis, and sketching out the machine's look and core functions.

The near-term goal is what's called an MVP, or minimum viable product — the simplest version of a product that still solves the core problem, built to get real feedback from real users before investing in more features. For Buki's first MVP, that means narrowing the machine down to three functions: can it wash, dry, and detangle a wig. The second MVP will expand to different wig types and cap lengths, but for now, she's deliberately keeping scope tight.

She's already gathered feedback from potential customers through early questionnaires. The response so far has been encouraging — people have told her that the concept is directly relevant to a problem they already have. The next milestone for Buki is getting an actual working prototype into their hands to test.

Her target demographic breaks down into two groups: salons, her primary audience, and individual wig wearers, a secondary but still important market. Both will help shape the product as it moves from concept to something you can actually buy and use.

She isn't building this alone. Her co-founder, Samuel Steven, is someone she's known since around 2020, though the two only began formally working together on this specific venture a few months ago.

What Canopy Community Taught Her

Buki credits the Canopy Community program with reshaping how she thinks about building a company — not just the product itself, but the business fundamentals behind it.

"I didn't know how much attention I had to pay to the financial aspect of my idea," she says, something she had discussed with her Canopy mentor. More importantly, the program helped her refocus on what the product needs to be in the first place: a solution to a real pain point. "It's not something that is beautiful and I can decorate my house with," she explains. "It really does solve a problem." That distinction — between a product people admire and a product people need — has become a guiding principle as Buki continues building.

Her Advice for Anyone Sitting on an Idea

Buki's advice for aspiring founders is refreshingly simple:

1. Write It Down. Don't let it stay a vague thought in your head.
2. Interrogate It. Does it actually solve a problem? Ask other people if they face the same issue, and whether your proposed solution would genuinely help them.
3. Find a Community. Programs like Canopy can help structure a raw idea into something sustainable and investable.
4. Test It. "Don't say, oh, it's just an idea. Just go for it and test it out. You never can tell where the idea can take you."

From satellite imagery to wig care, Buki's path shows that a founder's best idea doesn't always come from their field expertise — sometimes it comes from a frustrating Tuesday night and the willingness to actually do something about it.

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Interested in developing your own idea? Learn more about the programs at Canopy Community here https://www.canopy.community/store