How I Helped Build Africa’s First Grassroots Talent Marketplace with AMPZ

“Build what they need, not just what you can code.”
That philosophy guided me as I took on the challenge of helping AMPZ bring their vision to life—a digital platform to empower the next generation of African sports talent.

This is a story of winning and losing.

Many of my experiences has been as a CTO or a technical founder or technial owner. Usually something along those lines.

I had to make a tough decision to later go work at workforce. I remember calling my friend in Canada who now works at Webflow about the decision. And I think it was at the time one of the hardest decisions to make.

In retrospect I don’t think I understood how much that decision changed everything for me in terms of who I worked with, how I worked, the influence on design for me. I worked with Elijah Kingson who I just think gets design.

I worked with a couple of churn-it-out-in-5mins-top engineers. I think the most impactful was the fact that I worked on different types of databases. Working on writing migrations, pushing to prod, monitoring your push. Getting feedback from users and acting on that.

That was ZonetechPark but lets take a step back into the months prior.

In 2018, I had the opportunity to lead the technical development of AMPZ, a Nigerian startup with a bold mission: to create Africa’s first grassroots scouting marketplace.

The aim? Help thousands of overlooked athletes build their digital profiles and get scouted by clubs and agents globally.

With a clear mission and a small, passionate team that wasn’t put together by me, we set out to build more than just a mobile app—we we were building a bridge between potential and opportunity. The story in itself sold investors.

🏗️ Setting the Foundation: From Vision to Viable Product

When I joined AMPZ, the team had already validated a core problem: African grassroots athletes lacked visibility. There were no digital platforms showcasing their talents in a structured, scout-ready way. I joined the team on a contract basis. This period in nigerian tech did not have a thousands of developers as it does now.

I was just fresh off the boat of telling my parents I wanted to do tech and there was nothing holding me back. Nothing at all. I jumped into the Lagos market, moving from my city ibadan and not having a place to sleep but very confident I will figure it out.

I met a lot of people:

• People that did not know what they wanted to build, people that did.
• People that would pay you so cheap that it would be the equivalent of working on the factory
• People that did not understand software but thought they had the next billion dollar idea
• People who would make you sign 5 NDAs and and non-compete forms before they even told you their first name

It was the wild wild west. I think its relatively calmer now. And I wonder if I should have been wilder and probably taken on more risk.

When I was onboarded to the ampz project, I saw a team that needed some sort of technically crazy person who spoke busines language, at the time, I did not know that was what I was doing but after 5-10 meetings, always moving with the business guys, I understood what was happening.

I was the scrawny guy who understood tech and made things happen, I think it was the way I walked in my buttoned up shirt and regular platted pants with office type oxford shoes that gave it away. Or was it the way I always had my Macbook beside me ready to deploy it to any problem. I wasn’t odd because I liked business and would always have something to contribute but I also knew my secret power was being able to stare at my 13 inch macbook screen until the code worked. Important to say that it all worked out.

I started working on the platform, we started from the backend. I made sure we separated the backend from anything happening on the frotnend. Something I has picked up from one of the technical trainings I has gone for during these period. Luckily architecting the system this way paid off as we eventually had both a mobile and web interfaces.

We went with React Native as our cross-mobile platformer, the design ? That’s where I came in. A lot. Hiring a good designer, late nights to set the requirement of design. My house in the mianland of Lagos became the hotspot of mobile engineer, desingers, product people coming to work.

Our mobile talent at the time hadn’t even finished school but he knew enough for me, we could get our product out if a couple of things were working right. I have a strong sense of good talent. I might write an honest blogpost about what a good talent means to me one of these days.

💡 The Role I Played

I remember working closely with the founding team who I was introduced to by a head hunter, someone I knew from the past, somehow my leadership quality showed up real quickly, and I found myself leading this team.

• Leading the development of their React Native mobile application, we had to decide to go with React Native, primarily because of two reasons, it could handle media and the team was versed in Javascript. Something I wish we used on the frontend though was Typescript.
• Setting up the technical architecture and roadmap
• Implementing backend APIs and integrating third-party services
• Collaborating with the designer, syncing and prioritizing with the product lead and stakeholders.
• Rewriting the app to handle low bandwidth environments especially in africa where the use of feature phones was heavy and we were only a couple of years into our smartphone era

From architecture decisions to hands-on coding, my job was to align the right technology with AMPZ’s mission.

📲 Building the React Native App

Did I consider another route?

I think my second option would have been to go native and build for android. Android phones were extremely affordable and a convicing number of our addressable market used that. For a startup with limited resources, going RN was the most efficient way to deliver a polished experience on both Android and iOS.

My core believe with technology and choice of language is to initially use what you know, then diversify when your problem set changes because they will change. You will have scaling problems, you will have memory issues, you will have technical debt problems, bloat, other languages will promise to take you to the promise land. You who will have to decide which language takes you through these phases.

🧩 Key Features We Built

• Athlete Profiles: Users could showcase their sports journey, upload media, and record achievements.
• Video Uploads: Athletes could upload short clips of their performances—think of it as a mini-Showreel or sports CV.
• Social Proof: Other athletes and coahes can validate and track other ahtletes, we introduced this to keep things balanced, much like your managers dropping a review for you on LinkedIn. However it had to be technical proofs or else the athletes that could game the system by just being likable would have the most success.
• Scout Dashboard: Built to help scouts browse, filter, and contact athletes.
• Offline-first features: Local caching to allow use in low-connectivity environments.
• Notification system: To keep users informed about scout interest and profile views.

The aim was to mirror the professionalism of LinkedIn or Behance, but built specifically for athletes who typically had no access to that kind of visibility.

To be fair, LinkedIn was core to how we thought about it.

👩🏾‍💼 Empowering Inclusion: Tech Meets Equity

My time at AMPZ wasn’t just about building code—I think a lot of how I thought about the role was primarily enabling access.

During my involvement, AMPZ was also selected to participate in GreenHouse Capital’s female-focused tech accelerator, which aimed to support startups with diverse leadership and inclusive missions.

🌍 Scaling Across the Continent

The long-term vision was to connect 5,000+ African athletes to scouts within five years—a goal that sounded audacious, but entirely achievable with the right tools in place. (Source)

To support that scale, I worked on:

• Modular backend architecture for easy feature rollouts
• Monitoring tools for crash reports and user feedback

🎯 Lessons Learned

1. Build for your audience, not your ego
   We had to design for users with basic smartphones, limited data plans, and sometimes no formal ID. Every UI decision had to respect that reality.

2. Founders need tech leads who care about the mission
   The best tech partnerships aren’t just about skills—they’re about shared values. I was invested in the success of every athlete who would potentially sign up.

3. Startups need engineers who think beyond code
   From user testing to product-market fit discussions, I saw how important it is for engineers to be product-aware, user-driven, and vision-aligned.

💬 Final Thoughts

Helping AMPZ build Africa’s first grassroots talent marketplace wasn’t just a career milestone—it was a life lesson in what tech can do when it’s grounded in purpose.

Something I think we could have done better was how we stored and managed data, I think i’d have thought handling it like a media company. And I would probably not be using just one storage layer, it will probably be a combination of a KV storage and a Postgres/sqlite fork.

On the product marketing side, I think I’d have focused on making the product web.

Our revenue would typically come in from scouts, most scouts were not going to download our apps until we proved without a doubt we had value.

Now my approach would have been to create useful tools that scouts would. Sit with 15 of the most accessible but busy active scouts across europe ask them what tools they use and what potential they would like to exist. Get a 100 of them. It could be things like tax calcluators, calculators to monitor how much it costs to get talent from a remote village to africa. It could cheapest flights across africa. Rolodex of the top passport officials in Africa that can help you fastrack passport for talented athlets. Simple Rolodex of coaches in Nigeria and their experiences.

All these things are simple and requires not too much maintainance, we could have hired a SEO person who would sit with these too and find things the scouts were searching for and create guides, how-tos or tools for them.

Once we get them in, reach out to them and bring them into our app.

There are many ways this will fail but its a game of numbers.

TO BE CONTINUED

Whether you’re a founder looking for your first tech partner or an engineer looking to build something that matters, my advice is simple:

Find the mission. Start with what you have. Enter into the trenches and build the future.

Want to connect or collaborate?
I’m always open to working with founders who are building purpose-driven products — especially in emerging markets. Reach out via LinkedIn or Twitter.