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There is a version of this post that is deeply personal, the kind that starts at the very beginning and traces every decision, every failure, every moment where something could have gone a different way. That post exists and it will be written. But this is not that post.
This one is about what Applift is today, how we got to this point, and where we are going. It is written for anyone who has interacted with us, worked with us, or is trying to understand what we are building here.
We believe businesses power economies. Not policy alone, not foreign investment alone, but businesses. The founders building something real, the operators who have been running for years, the people who show up every day trying to make a margin work. In Nigeria, that work is happening everywhere, at every scale, and most of it is being done without the technology that could make it significantly more effective.
That is the problem Applift exists to solve. We use technology to make sure businesses are actually doing what economies need them to do: grow, sustain themselves, and create value. Everything we do, the services, the research, the products, flows from that.
Applift Labs was registered in the Federal Republic of Nigeria to deal in software, to support, implement, install, and furnish software technology to people. That was the founding language. The founding reality was a little more chaotic.
It started with a simple observation: getting an app onto the Google Play Store in 2024 required a level of infrastructure that most early-stage Nigerian founders simply did not have. You needed a registered business entity, a developer account, the right documentation. A lot of people with real ideas were being stopped at the gate, not because their ideas were bad but because the path to getting live was unnecessarily complicated.
We thought we could solve part of that. Set up the infrastructure, let founders publish under it while they sorted out their own. The name came from that thinking: Applift. Lift apps up to their users.
The plan did not survive contact with Google. It turns out there are structural barriers built into that platform that make the model we were trying to run very difficult. We wrote about that experience here; it is worth reading if you want to understand why mobile apps are often the wrong starting point for Nigerian founders building their first product.
But here is the thing about that failure: it was not wasted. The problem we had identified: that founders without strong technical backgrounds struggle enormously to build technology, was real. It did not go away just because our first interaction with it did not work.
Before Applift, there was Catura. A delivery product, built to solve a problem I had watched my sister face. I pulled together a team of people I trusted, seniors, people with more experience than me, and they came through. For a while. Then life got in the way, as it does, and the project stalled. The team dispersed. The idea did not become a business.
Catura left behind a lot of clarity: I had seen firsthand what happens when a founder with a real problem cannot hold a technical team together, when the gap between the idea and the ability to execute it becomes wide enough to swallow the whole thing. I had lived that gap. And I started to understand that this was not a unique problem. It was endemic. Great possible technology businesses did not happen and that was not because the founders were not serious, but because they did not have what was needed to build and sustain the technology their ideas required.
Around the same time, I was trying to make sense of a broader observation: that technology solutions in Africa were failing not because the technology was bad but because the businesses underneath them were not strong enough to sustain them. A great app with a weak go-to-market is still a dead app, a really good solution without a revenue to sustain it was bad business for the developer.The technology layer and the business layer had to be strong at the same time, and almost nobody I knew at the time was treating them that way.
So in early 2023, before Applift existed, I started a small community, the Small Business Community, where we held weekly meetups on marketing, sales, data, the fundamentals of running a business. People showed up. The conversations were real. And then I burnt out, because I knew nothing about running that kind of operation at that scale, and the energy I was spending there was energy I did not have.
I gassed out. I designed and redesigned a comeback that never came.
Applift itself was registered in May 2024, built around the Play Store idea. When that did not survive contact with Google, that is when the real scrapping-around period began. We had a registered company, a name, and no working model. So we did what anyone in that position does: we picked up software gigs, stayed close to the work, and tried to make money while figuring out what we were actually supposed to be.
In that period, we had people. At times, more people than we needed. We had projects, interesting ones, ambitious ones, the kind that felt important in the room but did not return much when the invoices came due. We had energy and ideas and almost no operational discipline to channel any of it.
There were stretches where payroll was a problem. Stretches where projects ran over, where clients were frustrated, where the gap between what we promised and what we delivered was wider than it should have been. Not because the people weren't capable, they were, but because the company did not yet have the structure to back them up. No real processes. No clear ownership. Too many directions at once. We were a group of people working hard without a system, and working hard without a system mostly just produces exhaustion.
We hired people who weren't right. We held on to projects that weren't working. We kept adding things when what we needed to do was cut. Every founder knows some version of this story. Ours ran for longer than I would like to admit.
Between mid-2025 and now, Applift stabilized.
That word, stabilized, sounds quieter than it was. What it actually meant was a series of hard decisions made in a compressed period of time. We cut projects that had been costing us time and money without returning real value. We stopped treating headcount as a signal of progress and started treating profitability as the primary measure of health. We went from a sprawling, unstructured group to a team of six: people we trusted, roles that were clearly defined, a way of working that we could actually sustain.
We built a proper operating cadence. We documented our values, not as aspirations but as operational standards. Ownership. Craftsmanship. Clarity. Initiative. These are not words on a wall. They are the baseline expectation for everyone who works here, including the people at the top.
Revenue became consistent. Operations sharpened. The business started to feel like a business.
We also shipped. Modools, a product we have been building for a specific set of users, is in active deployment. People are using it. We are learning from it. That matters.
We are a software services company. That is the clearest description of what we do today.
We work with three kinds of clients. Founders who have deep domain knowledge and want to build a product that has real business implications, not just a beautiful interface, but something that moves a number that matters. Established businesses that have been operating for years and need better systems to improve their margins, save time, and run more efficiently. And organizations and individuals who need a website, an application, or a management system built well and built to last.
What ties these together is that we are not interested in just writing code. We want to sit with the problem first. Understand what is actually broken, what the business is trying to do, and what kind of technology would genuinely serve that goal. The companies we want to work with are the ones who want that kind of engagement, not the cheapest option, not the fastest turnaround, but the most considered.
You can see some of that work here.
Alongside the services work, we have two functions that we are building deliberately, and both of them come from the same place the services work comes from: the belief that businesses need to be stronger, and that technology is one of the most powerful tools available to make that happen.
The first is Applift Intelligence, our Data and Market Intelligence arm. It exists to listen to the heartbeat of the market, understand what is actually happening in African digital commerce, and share those findings with the world. The Signal is the flagship output of that work, a research report series that goes deeper than the headlines. Edition 1, on the psychology of cart abandonment in Nigeria, is live. Edition 2 is in production. This function is how we stay sharp about the environment we operate in, and it is how we build credibility with the people we want to work with over the long term.
The second is internal product development. We build things we believe the market needs, informed by what the research is telling us. Modools came from this track.
Services. Intelligence. Products. Three expressions of the same purpose.
Both functions sit downstream of services for now. Services are what keep Applift a profitable, self-sustaining business. We are clear-eyed about that sequencing. We are not trying to be the most interesting company in the room. We are trying to build a strong company that lasts.
The goal has not changed since Catura, since the Small Business Community, since the first software gig we picked up trying to keep the lights on. We want Nigerian businesses to be stronger. We want founders who are building something real to have the technology they need to build it properly. We want operators who have been running for years to have systems that actually reflect how serious their businesses are.
Technology is the tool. Building strong businesses is the work.
In practice, that means continuing to grow as a services company that takes the work seriously, one that understands before it builds and shows up accountably every time. It means continuing to publish research that gives the market something real to work with. It means building products that address problems we keep seeing, problems the market has not solved yet.
Africa is where we are focused. Not as a limitation but as a deliberate choice. The problems here are real, the market is large, and there is an enormous amount of work to be done. We want to own that space before we look anywhere else.
We are here. There is a significant amount of work still ahead. But the foundation is cleaner than it has ever been, and the direction is clear.
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