“Software is only one part of building a marketplace. The harder job is creating enough trust and discipline for people to actually transact through it.”
That is the conclusion Kingsley Obi Lekan reached after 4 months of building Afruniverse, a Nigerian marketplace for African creatives. In April, the platform had fewer than 5 sign-ups and little more than an onboarding flow; now it has 100 registered creatives, 15 published services, 8 open jobs, creatives registered across 4 countries, and it can take payments. What it hasn’t done yet is convert any of that into independent hiring.
Afruniverse is still pre-transaction, and Lekan says so himself rather than presenting registrations as traction. That makes it a more useful case than most, because what stands between a working product and a working marketplace is visible and specific.
What 4 months of building produced
The core journey now exists end to end: clients can post opportunities, creatives can apply, clients can hire, payments run through Paystack, and the hired parties get a dedicated workroom for communication, files and delivery. Around that sit creator profiles and portfolios, service publishing, verification and payout-readiness checks, and a Creative Store for digital products. The marketplace has also been extended into fashion and modelling.
None of that is trivial to build alone, and Afruniverse is bootstrapped with no outside investment or grant funding. Lekan is the only person working on it day to day, paying for specific assignments as needed.
The gap is between registration and marketplace activity. “We know we have a conversion problem between registration and marketplace activity, but we do not yet have sufficient funnel instrumentation to quantify every stage properly,” Lekan said. Only a small proportion of the 100 registered creatives have progressed to being verified, publicly visible and genuinely hire-ready.
Declining to invent a drop-off percentage is itself instructive. Plenty of early platforms quote funnel figures their analytics cannot support.
Registered is not verified
“On Afruniverse, registered and verified are not the same thing,” Lekan said, and most marketplaces blur that distinction.
A creative shows as verified only after 4 conditions are met: a confirmed email, a phone number verified by one-time password, a government-issued ID uploaded and marked verified by an administrator, and approval through a manual profile-vetting process. Payment readiness sits separately, since receiving settlements also requires a Paystack subaccount and bank verification.
Lekan is explicit about what this does not amount to. There is no facial recognition, no BVN or NIN checking, no third-party identity screening. The identity component is a document upload reviewed by a person.
That honesty matters because verification is the claim that carries the most weight with a client deciding whether to send money to a stranger, and it is the claim most often stretched. A badge that means an administrator looked at an ID is worth something. It is not worth what a badge backed by bank-grade identity checks would be worth, and conflating the two is how marketplaces lose the trust they are trying to build.
Payment rails are not escrow
Afruniverse does not operate escrow. Its architecture uses Paystack and marketplace split payments rather than the platform taking custody of client funds. Workrooms keep the conversation, files and delivery attached to a job, but dispute resolution is, in Lekan’s words, still developing.
He has already met the problem in practice: a commission arranged through the platform was never completed by the creative, and the case remains unresolved. “Payment infrastructure alone is not sufficient,” he said. “A serious marketplace also needs clear evidence of delivery, dispute procedures and consequences for non-performance.”
This is the structural point that separates a payments integration from a marketplace. Moving money is a solved problem in Nigeria, and has been for years. Deciding who is right when a job goes wrong, holding the funds until that is settled, and imposing a consequence on the party at fault is not solved, and it is not something a payment processor does on a platform’s behalf.
When the money leaves the platform
Afruniverse has also run into off-platform leakage, where part of a transaction is settled outside the marketplace, and the platform never sees it.
“Once part of a transaction moves outside the platform, the platform loses visibility, and the protections and records associated with the transaction become incomplete,” Lekan said. He described it as exactly the behaviour a marketplace like Afruniverse is supposed to prevent.
Leakage is the quiet killer of marketplaces everywhere, and it is worse in markets where bank transfers are instant, free and socially normal. Once two parties have met through a platform, the marginal reason to keep paying through it has to be real. It is a design problem rather than a discipline problem: the platform has to make staying on it more attractive than leaving, usually through escrow, ratings that only accrue on-platform, or dispute cover that vanishes the moment money moves outside.
Four countries, one payout market
Creatives registered across 4 countries reads like a pan-African footprint. Lekan does not claim it is one.
“A client being able to make a card payment is not the same thing as Afruniverse being able to settle a creative in another African country,” he said. The validated payment and payout flows are centred on Nigeria and Nigerian Paystack infrastructure. Cross-border creator payouts, currency conversion and multi-country settlement remain ahead of the company, not behind it.
Nigeria is furthest ahead because that is where the company is based and where Lekan’s network is. Registrations elsewhere are encouraging, he said, but he would not describe those countries as active markets on that basis.
That restraint is worth noting, because cross-border settlement is the hardest problem in African digital payments and the one most often glossed over. That’s why stablecoin rails keep appearing in African payment corridors: moving value between African countries remains expensive and slow through conventional channels.
The Upwork question
A Nigerian designer can already use Upwork or Fiverr. Asked in one sentence why they would use Afruniverse instead, Lekan said it is “being built around the realities of African creatives and clients, local discovery, trust, payments and work relationships, rather than asking Africans to fit themselves into a marketplace designed somewhere else”.
He added the caveat himself: that is the proposition, and it still has to be proved at scale.
It is a real proposition, because global freelance platforms handle African payouts poorly, take a substantial cut, and rank African sellers against a worldwide field. A local marketplace that solved discovery, settlement and trust for African work would have something the incumbents do not. Solving all 3 is a considerable undertaking for a bootstrapped team of one.
What the 4 months actually taught
Lekan’s own summary is that he assumed building marketplace infrastructure and attracting registrations would translate more quickly into transactions, and it has not. He underestimated the work required around verification, profile completion, trust, client acquisition and keeping transactions on the platform.
That is the useful finding for anyone building something similar: the software is the tractable part. A single developer can now assemble posting, applications, hiring, split payments, portfolios and delivery workrooms in a few months. What cannot be assembled in a few months is why a client trusts a stranger enough to send money through a platform they have never used, and why both parties keep the transaction there when a direct bank transfer would be quicker.
Afruniverse has built the first part and is honest that it has not yet built the second. Whether it gets there depends on escrow, dispute machinery and cross-border settlement, none of which are features so much as commitments. The platform’s next milestone is not another integration; it is the first job that a client it has never met posts, funds and completes without anyone stepping outside to finish the payment.
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