BuildLog #1 I am operating a SaaS product since 2023 on the African market and I will be sharing my experiences and learning.

Hello, this is the very first article of a (hopefully) series of logs about my journey. I am from an African country named Cameroon, but I have been working remotely for a US company for the last 5 years where I am currently a Technical Product Manager, and I have built various stuff for clients around the world and locally. My native language is french. That's it about me. I started a product targeting students in late 2023, but mostly for the African market, even though it's usable anywhere. Why that market first, because i felt like it was the easiest to reach for me. But also there is a huge demands in various type of software / SaaS, and it comes with so many challenges, there is 54 countries on the African continent, most countries has different languages (+2000) and currencies (41), the population is mainly young and younger. This makes it interesting because there is a lot of challenges in such market and I believe it helps creating value at a global scale if I learn the skills to build and run a tech product in that kind of market. if I take a few examples of the challenges : Most peoples have never had a bank account or even used a credit card, so it's very hard to build subscription based tech business, unless it's VERY VERY VERY useful. The main payment system across the continent is mobile based (they call it Mobile Money), a digital wallet attached to one person phone number and used to pay various good and services. Most time online purchase are associated with poor quality product, customer service and scams, so a lot of people have a bad experiences and views about online purchases and that's not even about tech product or software. Internet coverage is very low in a lot of countries, so most users are not necessarily tech savvy. Most people prefers the human contact before purchasing something online. Each of these points add a challenge on it's own, for example I discovered that I could increase the purchase rate by adding a simple button to join a Support group on WhatsApp (main communication app in most countries). Some one told me about the fact she thought she had been scammed after purchasing and she didn’t know how to get in touch with me (there was a bug on the app at that time) A lot of users are not tech savvy and they don't even have a proper computer, so I had to work the mobile version of the application (responsive , light and fast) and increase the usability on mobile. I had to really workout the landing page and the words to make sure the user understand very well what the app does and how it does it. I couldn’t charge a recurring fee, so I built a one time payment system, so the user pays per document, I know it's still possible to do subscriptions but i will share this story later (turn out a some users are willing to pay a subscription). I operated the platform in one country for a year, received some payments, and then decided to expand internationally. This led to another round of issues and challenges, not very technical but more economics and financials. I said earlier that we have 41 currencies on the continent, and it's VERY hard to move money between countries (even neighbor countries). And stripe does not work, so i couldn’t create a stripe account and use it, PayPal works but partially (in some countries yes in some no), but it's well know. In my country for example I can use PayPal to send money but not receive. Going international meant I should have register business in many countries to receive payments, but I did not have the time or the money, so I used a company from a friend (where I am also involved) to do so. For the moment most countries from where users are paying share the same currency as my country (only in the name lol, F CFA), but i can't even access those money now, But at least I am glad I see payments coming in regularly. Most of them are coming through Mobile Money payments, i was able to work with a friend in Canada to get a stripe account and another one in EU to get a PayPal account, and I've got payments in both of them from the very first day i did pushed them to online. let's talk about numbers a bit. At the moment I have: ~1130 users , +1500 documents created it generated ~ $ 500 till date, I know it does not seem good and it's small, but it's a lot in my currency and considering that i did not invested a lot of time and no marketing campaign on it. For example early this year I verified the numbers and tried to count the amount of revenue it would have generated during the year 2024, it was roughly ~ $2000 ( 1 000 000 F CFA) the exact number is around 850 000 F CFA, this was HUGE for many reasons: I did not really promote it the whole year, some month I did not even talk about it online, and more importantly some user where simple not able to pay because the payment during that year where not available in their countries. I was also able to receive payments from EU clients recently. But the platform receives more and

May 9, 2025 - 01:37

BuildLog #1 I am operating a SaaS product since 2023 on the African market and I will be sharing my experiences and learning.

Hello, this is the very first article of a (hopefully) series of logs about my journey. I am from an African country named Cameroon, but I have been working remotely for a US company for the last 5 years where I am currently a Technical Product Manager, and I have built various stuff for clients around the world and locally. My native language is french. That's it about me.

I started a product targeting students in late 2023, but mostly for the African market, even though it's usable anywhere. Why that market first, because i felt like it was the easiest to reach for me. But also there is a huge demands in various type of software / SaaS, and it comes with so many challenges, there is 54 countries on the African continent, most countries has different languages (+2000) and currencies (41), the population is mainly young and younger.

This makes it interesting because there is a lot of challenges in such market and I believe it helps creating value at a global scale if I learn the skills to build and run a tech product in that kind of market. if I take a few examples of the challenges :

Most peoples have never had a bank account or even used a credit card, so it's very hard to build subscription based tech business, unless it's VERY VERY VERY useful.
The main payment system across the continent is mobile based (they call it Mobile Money), a digital wallet attached to one person phone number and used to pay various good and services.
Most time online purchase are associated with poor quality product, customer service and scams, so a lot of people have a bad experiences and views about online purchases and that's not even about tech product or software.
Internet coverage is very low in a lot of countries, so most users are not necessarily tech savvy.
Most people prefers the human contact before purchasing something online.

Each of these points add a challenge on it's own, for example I discovered that I could increase the purchase rate by adding a simple button to join a Support group on WhatsApp (main communication app in most countries). Some one told me about the fact she thought she had been scammed after purchasing and she didn’t know how to get in touch with me (there was a bug on the app at that time)

A lot of users are not tech savvy and they don't even have a proper computer, so I had to work the mobile version of the application (responsive , light and fast) and increase the usability on mobile.

I had to really workout the landing page and the words to make sure the user understand very well what the app does and how it does it. I couldn’t charge a recurring fee, so I built a one time payment system, so the user pays per document, I know it's still possible to do subscriptions but i will share this story later (turn out a some users are willing to pay a subscription).

I operated the platform in one country for a year, received some payments, and then decided to expand internationally. This led to another round of issues and challenges, not very technical but more economics and financials. I said earlier that we have 41 currencies on the continent, and it's VERY hard to move money between countries (even neighbor countries). And stripe does not work, so i couldn’t create a stripe account and use it, PayPal works but partially (in some countries yes in some no), but it's well know. In my country for example I can use PayPal to send money but not receive.

Going international meant I should have register business in many countries to receive payments, but I did not have the time or the money, so I used a company from a friend (where I am also involved) to do so. For the moment most countries from where users are paying share the same currency as my country (only in the name lol, F CFA), but i can't even access those money now, But at least I am glad I see payments coming in regularly. Most of them are coming through Mobile Money payments, i was able to work with a friend in Canada to get a stripe account and another one in EU to get a PayPal account, and I've got payments in both of them from the very first day i did pushed them to online.

let's talk about numbers a bit.

At the moment I have:

~1130 users ,
+1500 documents created

it generated ~ $ 500 till date, I know it does not seem good and it's small, but it's a lot in my currency and considering that i did not invested a lot of time and no marketing campaign on it. For example early this year I verified the numbers and tried to count the amount of revenue it would have generated during the year 2024, it was roughly ~ $2000 ( 1 000 000 F CFA) the exact number is around 850 000 F CFA, this was HUGE for many reasons: I did not really promote it the whole year, some month I did not even talk about it online, and more importantly some user where simple not able to pay because the payment during that year where not available in their countries. I was also able to receive payments from EU clients recently.

But the platform receives more and more visitors, users and customers. I work regularly to improve the experience and to promote it on social media.

So i decided to continue and share my story. The upcoming posts will be around the technical choices I made when building this, some will be about how I am promoting it.

Cheers.